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mylittlegemlins · 5 years ago

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STEVINEL IS NOT PEDOPHILE (AND IS BAD SAY IT)

Hello everyone 💖

Index:

introduction

inspiration

-pedophilia

- biological age

- mental age

- age of gems

-case spinel

-conclusion.

Today I finally got the inspiration from multiple publications stating that stevinel is in fact a pedophile ship and therefore we should not support it. Since I am a multishiper and I am very much in love with spinel I could not miss the opportunity to defend this ship to cloak and dagger.

Many of these comments I saw in the English fandom and the truth is that the debate did not seem to go anywhere like:

-is a pedophile ship one has 6000 and 17

-the gems are ageless.

[And I didn't really see that they would get anywhere, especially with a lot of immature people insulting most of the time and let's admit that comments from networks like Instagram or Twitter are not the best place to debate

Let's start by getting some concepts straight: Pedophilia :

Sexual attraction of an adult to a child of either sex. (google dictionary) This means that there must be a crush on a person who is (usually) considered an adult at 18 years of age or older and a minor who can be a baby from 5 years old to a puberty of about 14 years old, and between an adult + 20 years old and a teenager - 18 years old. Pedophilia does not occur among people who are at the same stage of life. Like two teenagers or two adults even if their ages seem far apart, see the case of two adults whose age difference is between 30 and 50 years.

Biological age

Biological age is marked by the number of years since your birth that your body and mind develop and change. We human beings have clear concepts of life stages, we know when childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age begin. There are even approximate ages where one has to consider oneself an adult. Like 18 or 21 years old.

And a number of behaviors are expected depending on your age, for example if you've had a brother or a cousin and you've seen it since you were a baby you may have seen one of these little brochures of what a healthy child should do depending on his age. Mental age Mental age is measured by a person's intellect and knowledge, which may or may not coincide with biological age.

Since biological age is expected to coincide with mental age and healthy development is usually measured only by the time a person has lived. Now, how does this work for gems? According to the concepts of the series a gem is literally a stone with a physical form of light, like a hologram with mass, these share many characteristics of humans such as being able to think, feel emotions and imitate some actions that naturally do not need to do like eating and sleeping. In humans it is very easy to measure age only by the amount of time since birth, because they change, and as the pink diamond itself showed. Gems can change but they don't need to.

The gems society is characterized by having a defined and static role and if you don't comply with it you are dead. Let's start with the mental age: In the diamond society everything worked in a very simple way, if you were born and you had to be a mechanic, you will be one for the rest of your life, since you are born with the necessary knowledge to fulfill this role. You don't need to learn new things unless it is about mechanics since you will not dedicate yourself to anything else, you don't need to alter your physical form since you are not allowed to, you don't need to change since you must fulfill your work and nothing else.

Your mental age remains completely stagnant because it does not have the need to mature just to fulfill your work, the gems are born with the ability to speak, communicate and interpret ideas, as is the case of Ruby Leggy, who was born one day when he left for his first mission.

Biological age :

The same Pearl confirmed that the gems cannot be babies, nor to age, reason why the babys and the old age do not exist for the gems. To the being its body only a projection of light the form that can acquire is very varied and changes of radical way in some occasions, although the form that represents an adult woman, this form changes radically depending on the class of gems, lapis lazuli and pearl have a body formed of a young woman, the quartz gems have a much more muscular and robust body that is made much to a physical-culturalist man.

The clearest example of a male gem is Topaz, since anyone would think he was a man until the moment they heard his voice, and even though the rutile twins use the female pronouns have a masculine appearance.

Gems like Fluorite are represented as a much older woman, even though their components may all be young.

She speaks very slowly due to the amount of gems that have to process the information within her mind.

And gems like Padparadcha have a much younger and smaller appearance, like some girls, compared to Sapphire because of her behavior Not to mention gems that are literally rocks and walls that are impossible to classify. All of these exaggeratedly different shapes make people interpret gems with different ages based on their behavior and appearance.

amethyst is the example of a growing gem, perhaps the fact that it is defective has a lot to do with it, she crawls in her first seconds of life during the film and imitates everyone like an infant trying to form her personality from others, she had a much sweeter and smaller appearance in Greg and Rose's flashbacks, being carried by Perla and hiding behind Rose's lack, Rebecca confirms on a podcast that Rose was like a mother to amethyst, if the gems were adults without exception, why would an adult need a mother figure of another adult?

Her outfit accompanies her as she has comfortable clothes and a skirt, she behaves like a teenage big sister figure for Steven during the series by accompanying him, at the same time that he allows himself to mock and fight with him, having that love / hate relationship that many people with brothers can understand and as an adult when reaching the future.

Peridot is represented in a very childish way too, the people who ship stevidot did it because they saw a kid, suddenly she was the same size as Steven, she behaved childishly and Mr. Smile called her kid, so far it was only confirmed that It was from era 2, so it could be both 5000 and 5 years old.

Probably the gems need to get along as a team, if they have to coexist with many other gems, but in theory this does not go beyond a coexistence or friendship of work colleagues since dependence or romance leads to sentimentality, which for the mother planet is useless and even harmful. In short, from birth all their social and intellectual development is truncated and they cannot mature So for most gems on homeworld their mental age is almost the same from birth to destruction.

This was demonstrated with Peridot and lapis in the episode "The New Crystal Gems" Both are gems from the mother planet, one knew how to terraform planets and the other had extensive knowledge of engineering, however they fought over who was to blame for their failure using insults like "foolish" and comparing themselves with other people, a very childish behaviour. So much so that a human thousands of years younger had to correct them. Within the series we were unable to confirm if peridot and lapis had a team to socialize with. So it is likely that throughout their lives they have not had the need to socialize and live together, or even accept their mistakes. Peridot seemed like a child prodigy with so many scenes of childish behavior and her high knowledge of what she was assigned, while other gems like pink diamond were born as immature children and it took her millennia to reach maturity.

With the case of spinel it is completely different. In her introduction stanza she says "her cut is perfect and she is pink too, she will give you endless entertainment, your new spinel best friend" that and together with what later says pearl "she was the little pink diamond playmate". It gives us an idea of what spinel used to look like.

It even strikes me that pearl refers to her as "little playmate" giving the impression that some gems are considered bigger than others based on their rank/trade or size.

First, let's remember that Spinel is literally based on a cuddly toy that Rebecca loved but forgot in a garden and when she returned after a year her belly was black from the fading sun, the doll was in the same place but had already been permanently damaged. Rebecca wanted her character to feel old as "stuck in time" that's why she uses Ruben Hose style animation from the 30's and later in future she uses references to 90's video games to give the feeling that she grew up since she left the earth but she still keeps an old and animated essence.

Spinel is a gem that was born perfectly fine and flawless, besides being literally a living cartoon like a lonnytoon, was created only with knowledge of gameplay and fun to eternally entertain its owner, and that was all she cared about, making her best friend happy .

She was practically a child, all she cared about was playing and being happy with her best friend, something that a neuro-typical adult would not do. She spends most of the movie without leaving Steven's side, even when she sees that he is depressed she can't think of a way to comfort him and just tries to make him laugh, instead of asking him about the problem and trying to provide him with a solution. I can't help but think that she was playing the whole time, from her fight in her evil form and the time she was in her friendly form with the rest of the gems, since almost every battle consists of dodging the attacks as if she were playing tag, and using the gems as dolls or balls. He even says he doesn't want to play anymore when he's done with Steven 💔

And after being stuck in the garden doing nothing but waiting without moving, the phrase "stuck in time" becomes more literal since by doing absolutely nothing but thinking there is no change or maturity. It is not until after the trauma that she goes into a fit of thinking she has changed for the worse, but she was not thinking reasonably at that time. Her best friend left her and she wanted to kill a whole planet. What was she going to do after she succeeded? How would she get back to the mother planet where we had killed a new diamond?

After the film she goes on with her life with the diamonds, the series did not deepen much in her development so she seems to be better, even after her scars manifested in tears and dark circles she still maintains an energetic personality, excited and wanting to help even if it is with a stupid song. Spinel is certainly not close to looking like a mature adult for her 6000 years of age, like many other gems.

As for her physical form I am not 100% sure what age she is approaching as the designs of the gems are very varied and extravagant. She has an adorable and childish design, like a cuddly toy, her height is in fact almost the same as Steven's (17 years old) and she also has good hips in some scenes. I would say that her shape resembles that of a young girl.

Even people who are not very familiar with the series might classify her as a child or a teenager, but not as an adult. Because the logic of the human body and biological age cannot be applied to gemstones, this is the reason why many ships Stevenx gem are so popular, but adult human x Steven don't exist at all. Because they know that age only applies to humans.

I know I've focused a lot on Spinel but because of Steven being half human there's not much mystery.

His physical form literally fits his mental age. Let's also remember that Steven is not 14 anymore, he was 16 at the time of the movie and 17 in the middle of the Future series, there were many time jumps within this series and I think the longest one was right at the end, where it had been months since the collapse and since he started therapy, when he finally decided to move he could perfectly have been 18, which is the age to become independent, at least in the USA, he is not a child, he is starting his young adult stage, just 4 years old from the age Greg was when he fell in love with Rose.

Conclusion.

Even if he were 17, he can drive, he can move, he can be independent and choose his own path, he had just left the nest and that is called being a conscious adult. Besides the fact that the separation of 18 years is used only for consent to sexual relationships before the law, but in practice it is the approximate age at which a person should already mark his maturity, that you like ships with minors is not a justification for drawing nsfw with minor characters, and it is not intended to defend that in any way in this blog, ships like the conniverse can work without +18 content in the same way that stevinel can have content without +18.

The gems can have an age but it is not at all similar to that of humans, since by the circumstances you are can remain stagnant during millennia or change in few years, the same for their physical form since you are not able to acquire a form of baby or old people, and its body remains of the same size throughout all its life, except for cases like the one of Rose/Pink.

I know that there are many people who don't like stevinel because it is toxic or because there is conniverse and I won't say that it isn't because the blog is not about that.

I know some will say that "but they are adults, no matter how they look, act and be like children." Well, it does matter, since we are talking about immortal aliens who are not born, grow, reproduce, or die.

The cartoons do not always represent human beings realistically, much less immortal characters. In fantasy a child can have a highly developed body or a PhD, and an adult can transform into a child with time machines and grow twice.

The fact that Steven falls in love with a gem whose shape resembles that of his age is as healthy as Greg, who fell in love with a gem in a physical form similar to women of his age, Who should have the appearance and maturity of an elderly woman for her millions of years, but the fact that she acts and looks like an adult is what makes her an adult character. His cousin Andy confirmed that he has always liked big women, so he could have fallen in love with Rose 4 years earlier too.

Spinel does not have to exercise a power relationship over Steven, her dependence arises from the fear of being abandoned and not because she is jealous of her other friends, when she leaves with the diamonds, it is seen that she is not attached to them all the time. He gives himself the freedom to meet new people through the halls of the palace and leave the diamonds alone when requested, proving that he is capable of changing for the better just as Steven told him.

So the relationship could work if the right circumstances are given, such as in the AU where fans give themselves the freedom to invent scenarios where the spinel does not try to kill him, where Steven is of legal age, where both are human, etc. And so with many other ships that can go from toxic to healthy in a few fanfic chapters.

We must not forget that it is a caricature and that everyone can have fun shiping characters. Unfortunately this age argument has become a bad excuse to hate a shipp or the people behind it.

And it's wrong to say this because reducing such a strong theme to something childish, fictional and fantasy can be considered an offense to the victims that exist in real life, this myth has given rise to what real people who cannot enjoy their tastes and what others find a perfect excuse to be haters without measuring their words.

Both children and adults do not perceive an adult and a child in relationships involving immortal characters even after knowing the series, this was never the first thought of someone who saw the characters together, in fact it was 5 months from the release of the film before I found out that someone was calling the relationship "pedophilia".

Because they don't grow linearly like humans do. Unlike relationships between human characters of a more realistic appearance as happened with Danny PantomxVlad where they can see first sight who is the adult and who is the child.

What they can see with the naked eye is how well accepted it is to insult the likes of others, that it's okay to be made to feel bad for making the terrible mistake of liking a ship, and that you have the right to insult the likes of others. if they do the same with yours. Which is too present in the Steven Universe fandom.

So no, they are not protecting children from pedophilia in the SU fandom, they are harming real children at the cost of trying to protect a fictional young man, making them insecure of their tastes, giving them the tools necessary to hate someone to death, and making them accept that their tastes are terrible and they must swallow them even if they are not doing anything wrong.

Accusing innocent people of pedophiles, liking or promoting pedophilia is not something you can take so lightly, also it should be illegal if everyone can be a pedophile for simple and innocent things, the word loses its meaning and the subject is taken too lightly, reducing the severity of actual pedophilia and causing serios problems for people who ate wrongfully accused.

They both look good together to me and I can still enjoy comics and pictures of them together, and those who don't, live with it, and enjoy your favorite ship.

Well I really hope you liked this, I can't believe it's 14 thousand characters, remember that insulting comments will be deleted or blocked. Thank you so much for watching :3

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coronasaurus-05 · 5 years ago

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Lee Know: FINDING YOU (Pt. 1 – Fan meeting)

The fan meeting venue is packed, Y/N sat there with her banner and lightstick. She was very excited for this day because of Stray Kids and she finally met her internet friend who is visiting Korea for the fan meeting. They are sat next to each other; the members will be coming out in a few minutes now and they are both on twitter tweeting their excitements and is just tagging each other with their nonsense.

“Y/N I cannot believe that we finally met! And thank you for letting me stay with you for the meantime of my stay here.” Layla said to her. Y/N turned to look at her and pulled her into a tight hug, “Of course! I completely trust you even though we first argued about whose bias is better.” Layla just sniggered and stuck her tongue out.

They both took many selfies and has both their cameras ready. Layla was talking gibberish to her Changbin banner as Y/N was taking a video of her then suddenly a mic was turned on a someone tapped on it. Everybody became quiet, with her phone still recording she turned it to the platform.

“Mic-mic test. Mic- AHHH.”

“Felix you are just stalling us-HELLO STAAAAYY”

The whole venue laughed first then screamed from the top of their lungs. All the members started piling in one by one. Y/N and Layla started waving their banners aggressively just like everyone else. Layla started sobbing because it is her first time seeing them before her in real life. Y/N just laughed at her and turned her phone towards her to catch her tears as a memorable moment of her friend.

“Step out- Hello we are STRAY KIDS.” The fans roared which made a few members look at the crowd in awe.

It was their turn. Layla brought along this big paper bag with the things she wants to give the boys and same with Y/N but a smaller paper bag. As they neared the platform Layla looked back to her and then started randomly shaking her hands in excitement and squealed in gibberish which made her smile and join in with her excitement. Minho was the first member on the table, Layla basically ran towards him and it made him laugh at her excitement.

And now that Y/N is up there. She has attended all fan meetings ever since their debut, so she is pretty much close to them because they recognize her already. Lee Know saw her and he smiled and nudged Felix beside him, “Hey Y/N is here, I think the person in front of you is her friend.” He whispered in his ear.

Y/N is now in front of him. He looked at her and smiled as he took the album from her grasp.

“May I know your name?” He said jokingly. Of course, he knows her name. In the previous fan meeting he wrote down her name without asking her. She crossed her arms and pouted, “Lee Know hyung seems to be weak with remembering names.”

“Tsk! There you go again calling me hyung. Why don’t you call me oppa like a normal girl?” Lee Know playfully sneered at her. She stuck her tongue out instead and reached into the paper bag she had hooked in her arm. She took out a small plastic gift bag, and inside is a Phone case and a key chain, she handed it to him with both hands and smiled at him.

Lee know took out the phone case, it really fit his taste. “Ooh, I like it Y/N. You always get us new phone cases when we have new phones. Thank you.” She smiled then she held her hands up, he immediately held her hands intertwining them.

“Can we talk about your vocals? Because you really sound so good! Not that you didn’t sound good in the last comeback but still!” She continued on rambling and he was nodding along to what she was saying with a smile maintaining the eye contact.

“Of course, I will always do my best for our stays.” Lee Know smiled brightly and Y/N tightened her hold on his hands and swung it side to side giggling.

When she moved on to the ret of the members, he keeps on looking at her. She communicates well with them. Lee Know knows that they, Stray kids already recognizes her. They consider her a close friend already.

They moved on to the next segment of their fan meeting. The fans where made to write questions on a post-it notes and stick it on the board next to the platform.

“I hope Changbin will see my note.” Layla muttered out and looked Y/N. She just made a face to Layla and looked at her with the side of her eyes, “Did you really write your number on the post it?” Layla nodded her head and held it high.

“Okay guys~ everyone’s notes are on the board, correct? Since I am already holding a mic, I will choose a question.” He went near to the board that is filled with over lapping notes.

“Ooooh, rank your most to least favorite member as of today.” I.N just laughed and made the members close their eyes as he went at pointed them out. Changbin was the last one which made him complain.

“Whyyyy?! What did I do???” Changbin look at him in betrayal and the rest of the members laughed.

“Hyung, you said that my cooking sucks last night.” I.N. said. Everyone awed and then called out to Changbin. He just scratched the back of his neck.

“Sorry Maknae~” Changbin apologized and went to hug him. “Okay hyung, go pick a note.” Changbin walked up to the board and spotted something else. “Oh! I will keep this in my pocket.” He said folding the paper and tucked it into his pocket. The rest of the members all started shouting and he just waved them of picking the next paper.

They continued on with the segment. I.N and Seungmin sang a cover of 3racha which hyped up the whole auditorium. Danceracha performed dawn and then lastly all of them sang the whole new album for stays.

As the members are singing, Felix went near to Changbin and asked for what the paper was all about. Changbin took out the piece of paper and showed it to Felix.

“Wahh hyung, I mean we are allowed to already but are you sure about her?” Changbin spotted her in the crowd. Y/N seemed to notice and nudged Layla beside her who sat beside her being so focused of Jisung who was rapping.

Layla looked so confused, “What?” she whispered. “Changbin is looking at you.” Layla scanned them on the stage until she met his eyes. He had the post-it note in his hand and Felix is standing beside him. She just smiled at him wiggling her eyebrows which made him smile down to the floor and put the paper back into his pocket.

“Oooohhhh, I can already see the allkpop and soompi headlines. International fan caught the attention of the Changbin from Stray Kids.” Y/N waved her hands in the air like SpongeBob’s imagination. Layla just poked her side that made her jolt and cup her side.

“we all know that the universe won’t let that happen… unless.” Layla leaned in to her wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

The fan meeting dragged on. Stray Kids handed out snacks to everyone, Lee Know kept on interacting with Y/N which made her really shy. And Changbin being very subtle with Layla.

“Hyung, you seem really close with Y/N.” Felix muttered lowly to Lee Know. He can really see how he interacts with the girl; it is as if he went to high school with her or have known each other at some point. Lee Know looked at him dead in the eye.

“You don’t recognize her? She hasn’t changed at all.” Felix just looked at him puzzled. Lee Know sighed, “I wasn’t even there when Stray Kids was busking out on the street back in the survival show but I saw her in the episode. She was right beside the barricade.” He said to Felix who just tilted his head looking at him.

“I’ll show you later.” He patted his shoulder and went to join the others because the song is about to end.

“Unfortunately, that was the last song for today.” Everybody awed, and the members frowned looking at their fan before their eyes. Hyunjin being his dramatic self, he hugged Bang Chan and pretended to cry on his shoulder which made the fans crack up.

“But don’t worry! We will be seeing you guys soon again.” Bang Chan waved to the crowd and so did the rest of the members. The staff are already cleaning up, they already removed everything that was on them the whole time. Lee Know gave Y/N one last longing look before scanning the rest of the audience. His stare made her burn up but she just smiled at him. He then had a satisfied look on his face because of her smile.

It is a good day for the both of them.

Y/N and Layla started to go back to her apartment still hungover of the fan meeting. The whole taxi ride, they are looking at the videos they took of the group which made them laugh and the driver irritated because of how loud they were being.

“OMG, remember when Changbin just- asdfhlqjfhaof.” Layla stuffed her face into one of the pillows on the couch fangirling incoherently. Y/N sat beside her and inside her mind is when Lee Know stared at her for a few seconds. She let her face burn up as she looked up the ceiling and sighed with a smile.

“Girl, I heard that ‘dreamy’ sighing. What’s it about.” Layla perched her head up on her hand and looked at her.

“Lee Know Stared at me before they exited.” Y/N said lowly enough for her to hear. Layla smiled at her and smacked her thigh, “GIRL YOU IS GETTING THAT Y/N MOMENT!” Layla fangirled for her instead and Y/N laughed.

“Anyways, do you think Changbin will text you?” Y/N immediately changed the subject. Layla pouted at her and hugged the pillow.

“I hope he does.” Layla said.

They were equally tired so Y/N just decided to order food for them, and while waiting they decided to go and shower for the evening; and Layla is still feeling jet lagged because she arrived in Korea the day before the fan meeting.

The food is great as always. Layla is so amazed the such taste can be graced in her tongue. So, they planned to go out the next day and check some popular places to go in Y/N’s area. They threw out their trash tidied up the place before going to their shared bedroom, which in Layla’s eyes that looked cute. And of course, Layla didn’t want to miss out on some Korean skincare, so they wore some facemasks that were stored in Y/N’s drawer.

“Layla, can you give me my paper bag? I want to look at the album.” Y/N asked Layla and she picked it up from the floor, “I wanna see what’s in your album.” Layla said then plopped herself down beside her,

They softly turned the pages of the album while the cd is playing. They complimented on how they look and Identified whether which brand they are wearing for the shoot until Layla gasped. Y/N looked at what she was pointing at. At the bottom corner almost camouflaging with the print.

“No, don’t tell me…” Layla dragged on. It was a series of numbers and upon realization Y/N’s eyes turned wide. “Is it his number???” She is shaking now and typed in the number on her phone.

“Go on! Give it a call.” Layla urged her. She shook her heard and breathed in a couple of times first. “Should I? Oh, my ghad Layla….” Layla snatched her phone and before she can react, the number is ringing.

They held their breath; the room was so quiet the ringing seemed so loud in their ears.

“Hello?” A voice that they so well know answered.

#stray kids #stray kids imagines #lee know x reader #스트레이키즈 #skz scenarios #skz lee know #skz lee minho

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asherlockstudy · 6 years ago

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I get that interview was HBO forced but it sounds insane when last season, he was saying Jaime needed to get away from her for good. I mean no nice post about Gwen after the last ep. I dont believe it was about not wanting to stir the hornet's nest if him and B didnt get together as he posted a huge loving one about Lena and that was a very controversial part of the plot. If hed know posted a gwen one saying"sorry JB didnt get a happy ending but here's me and Gwen in happier times" i dont get it

I think it’s very weird too…Imma analyze it. Not that I’m gonna reach any solid conclusion but I will just lay out all my thoughts.

Whatever the reason Nik doesn’t post or reply publicly to Gwen is, it has nothing to do with his personal preference for Braime or Jaime x Cersei. Even if we make the insane assumption that Nik appreciated that Jaime dumped Brienne to return to murderous Cersei and die with her without serving any purpose in the main plot (what lead actor of 8+ years would ever like being unimportant in the ending plot) and saw “pOeTRy” in it, it still doesn’t explain why he should prefer posting about Lena over Gwen. We would be naive to think he made a post about Lena and not Gwen because he prefers Cersei to Brienne. So, we still have no clear evidence of what Nik’s private thoughts and feelings are for his character after the ending.

Here’s what we have:

We have two interviews: one with HBO rofl and one with that journalist who collaborates with HBO and was an insider (I’m not gonna search his name) in which he stans Jaime’s choices, his love for Cersei and the tragic poetry in it all. Then we have him promoting the episodes and the documentary in his instagram and twitter, however he is entirely emotionally detached from his character and his fate. I would say he lowkey looks entertained in his weird af episode promo videos and secretly amused while filming the “thank you” video after the last episode where he says “Come on, it was great” and suggests a petition for an Arya (huh?) sequel.

We have two videos uploaded on yt with him: one is a video of a stalker in which Nik looks uncomfortable and passes the question to the random guy next to him who apparently happens to be a GOT fan, have an elaborate opinion on the last season, hate D&D and think they threw away Jaime’s beautiful character arc. What are the odds…The second is a skit in Jimmy Kimmel in which Nik drags his own character by making him stupid and clumsy, a sad little being because of his maiming and, most importantly, an unrepentant sister fucker. All of Jaime’s worst qualities displayed for laughs, plus that he’s actually a likeable but very stupid person. The skit ends with a dragon randomly burning him and his family alive and those credits

So, we have straightforward criticism towards D&D by Kimmel and NCW actually participates in it. This is what this skit means - that this level of writing, this kind of lame character and that ludicrous death is something that only Benioff and Weiss would like to produce. And, well, the Olsen sisters (although I think they’re cleverer than that).

So, we have two videos where NCW’s intentions are dubious AT BEST.

Then we have all the promos. When left to speak on his own, Nikolaj would say how the ending was beautiful and made sense and he once mentioned he sent a letter to thank them for this genius plot…Right. But then when asked or caught off guard (1:04):

youtube

Nobody tries to sugarcoat it, look at the title of the video: … NCW is ‘happy’. Then of course we have our Lady and Saviour Gwen who tries not to laugh as Nik struggles to find what to say and not just stand up and flee.

Also, this one. The best one:

youtube

I could make a thousand gifs for this but just watch again the entire video:

0:07 - Gwen’s face when Nik says he thought the script was fantastic

1:13 - “N-no..NO!!!” when asked if he would change something in the ending and Gwen’s reaction to that. Then, our leader Gwen proceeds to mock him: “So, it’s an immaculate- It’s immaculate?” to which Nik impulsively replies: “NO!” and goes on “do you ever read a book and think you want to rewrite this?” which implies, that yes he would want to rewrite it but knows he can’t.

(3:03 - 3:06) - VERY IMPORTANT ONE. When Gwen wondered who was closer to predicting the actual ending, Nik says “I was, yeah” and OMG look at Gwen’s face. It’s very subtle but she’s trying to communicate with her eyes a “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT” to him without being seen by the interviewer. It’s kind of a wife done with her husband’s shit look tbh, that level of subtlety. And Nik answers back with his eyes in equal subtlety and it’s like he says a “What? I truly was right lol….”. To me, this seems to mean that Nik always knew or feared that D&D would eventually destroy all his work and was eventually proven right. Unless this all is about Dany being killed by Jon but I doubt at this point Nik and Gwen cared enough to go all cryptic and eye communicating for this. No, it was about them.

3:09 - Nik is surprised and then clearly amused at the information by the interviewer that Kit was the one who came closer with his prediction. He can’t hide his smile and says an ironic “good for him” while looking knowingly at Gwen who then says this must be a lie. This shows that it is known amongst the actors that most of them are disappointed and Kit was one of them. Both Nik and Gwen apparently knew Kit hated his ending too and would never expect this to be how the show would wrap up. BTW that writing and that backlash really got to Kit, I hope he recovers soon. But think about this, Kit went into rehab for stress and alcohol, Emilia was devastated and gave a somewhat concerning interview and Nik’s public behaviour regarding GOT is inconsistent and unpredictable. I am thus assuming the writing of the final season and the backlash fucked them up way more than they let on.

This interview is a gem but here’s the most important part, perhaps the core of what baffles us:

1:32 - After all the miserable no-nos poor Nik mumbles, Gwen tells Nik what we all think: “I think it’s just a question, you know? Maybe you want to answer it?”

Of course he’s in a total loss for words. Literally, he doesn’t make any sense. Some incoherent sounds come out of his mouth and that’s it. This can mean two things: either he truly thinks the ending is perfect or the ending made him such a mess that he can’t even process it verbally two years later.

Either Gwen is much braver and Nik is extemely paranoid or Nik actually has many more restrictions in what he is allowed to say. I believe Gwen wanted Nikolaj to be as open as her about it and she still tries to make him open up but he doesn’t. In all the promos without exception, Gwen looks as if she knows Nik is full of shit and secretly agrees with her. If Gwen knows that for a fact, then we can’t argue and it’s actually what makes sense anyway. Nikolaj agrees with Gwen but is not eager to discuss it openly yet, or ever. This could be because he is very professional or because he doesn’t want to get a bad name as a “backstabber” of his projects or it might be a situation of a more sensitive nature.

If those rumours that the S8 script was changed are true, then Nik and Lena might have had a serious breakdown with D&D and a negotiation might have taken place. For instance, Nik and Lena were really unnecessary in E6, Nik’s scene in E1 could have been eliminated as well and Lena does not appear in E3. Yes, they are big actors but paying them 1,2 million for every episode seems a tad excessive when Emilia and Kit are now famous too and have like 300% times more screentime. All this is wild speculation but maybe they stretched their appearance in the episodes as much as possible and gave them a good amount of money to agree on the butchering of their characters and their importance as former lead actors. I mean, especially Lena was downgraded to a secondary character in this season. Lena had to really fight to see her salary rise in the previous seasons. And now it’s a million for every episode? Wow. How many minutes was she staring out of the window in S8? Maybe they were silenced and payed a shitload of money to stop complaining and promote the show and praise the writing as what it was supposed to be. Maybe they payed them in order to promote Peter, Kit and Emilia for the Emmys instead, who knows. When so much money is involved, things can get frustrating in ways we don’t even fathom. This is wild and rough speculation but all I’m saying is there may be reasons Nik avoids talking freely about his character that we can’t know.

Besides, it’s not just a Gwen problem. It is not a Gwen problem. Gwen revealed she sent a “Jaime is a fuckboi” meme to Nik privately and he answered playfully as ever (but again as if he’s in denial). They posted a story together a couple of weeks ago. Nik did not just ignore Gwen’s instagram post. Daniel Portman posted the photo and tagged Nikolaj too. Nik ignored him as well. Bryan Cogman, who Nik and Gwen owe a lot to, commented under the photo in a very sweet and emotional way. Guess what, Nik ignored him too! It’s ridiculous to think Nikolaj has stopped communicating and caring about Gwen AND Daniel AND Bryan just because his character returned to Cersei. Furthermore, the fact that they all keep tagging him shows they don’t think their relationships with him have become tense.

That’s not it. It’s not about Gwen. The only way that Gwen is involved in all this is that she wants Nikolaj to open up so that he would give a little acknowledgement to her character and the relationship with Jaime because she feels very much for Brienne. I’m sad to say, however, that it seems to me that Nik did not take that blow more lightly than Gwen. In fact, his behaviour is more inconsistent and troubling whereas Gwen’s openness about it made her confront that sore subject more healthily after all. I start believing Nik was actually way more devastated than Gwen. At least Brienne remained a decent character, ever faithful to her ideals, ever innerly strong. Jaime was entirely trashed, let alone that he was supposed to be a main character. If Nik can’t even handle a photo that reminds him of his destroyed character arc, I wouldn’t be surprised. Maybe Gwen wants Nik to open up so much for his benefit as well - he keeps it bottled up and she might know first hand how that affects him.

Long story short, the reasons Nik doesn’t post anything about his feelings for Jaime’s character arc, his relationship with Brienne and his collaboration with Gwen probably are both professional, after begrudging deals and agreements and restrictions from HBO, and very personal, inner and private, as he’s still trying to cope with a disappointment that crushed down on him from what used to be his dream job and a role he hoped would be a (or the) peak of his career. I bet all these years Nik was hopeful Jaime would be extremely important and fully redeemed in the end but also extremely scared and anxious that the writers won’t give him what he hoped for and what made sense. Would I exaggerate if I said this should be the biggest professional disappointment he ever experienced, provided that he didn’t like the character’s ending?

From everything Gwen has said about him, I have surmised that Nik is very emotional and anxious but with a very blasé and superficially amiable attitude. He avoids expessing emotion in real life which is why he might be dissociating a lot lately. He tries to distance himself from that part of Jaime’s character that involved Bryan and Gwen because this is the part that he loved and lost. Honestly, I can’t think of any other logical reason he ignored Gwen, Dan and Bryan one after the other and never made a post about his own character specifically or his good times with Gwen. It’s obviously not that he suddenly hates all of them to the point of not even replying. Even if HBO restricts him on what he can say in interviews for a while, there is no other explanation for this other than that D&D’s genius writing fucked him up emotionally as much as Emilia and Kit and he does not want to deal with it even though Gwen probably thinks it would be for the best if he did.

Now after I wrote all this, imagine if Nikolaj actually doesn’t give a shit and is just happy going on with his life while I am here wasting time. But… I don’t think so. I will never not believe Nik didn’t love Jaime to pieces. He had big dreams for this role, I am sure of it.

#nikolaj coster waldau #jaime lannister #gwendoline christie #nik and gwen #jaime x brienne #braime #got negativity #more

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the-prophet-lemonade · 6 years ago

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do you have any advice on getting a story to be seen? i made an ao3 account not too long ago so no one has seen my fic at the moment but i was wondering if you had any tips on that, or would i just have to wait?

hello! i can’t claim to know what makes a fic popular as it’s 99% luck, but i can speak for the remaining 1% that has worked ~reasonably~ well for me in the past.

i think there are three key elements to getting a fic “seen”: marketing, branding, and presentation, and they’re all very important. this post got very long, so please find everything under the cut! i hope it helps :-)

i. marketing

fic marketing may seem a bit narcissistic if you haven’t done it before, but trust me on this: it’s the best way to attract readers and you deserve to promoted your story as something you worked hard upon!

drumming up hype for a fic is great. you can do this by posting on social media, providing sneak peaks on your twitter, involving yourself in the fandom community and discussing your wips with other fans, and just generally being excited about what you’re creating. engaging with other people’s writing is also a great method to help boost your own stats … get involved with reading other work and leaving comments for other people, because they will be more likely to return the favour! when someone comments on my fics, i often go and check out their profile and see what they’ve written, as it’s highly likely we enjoy the same things!

making promos is one of my favourite ways to engage with people about fics. once i post a fic/new chapter to ao3, i also crosspost promo posts with links and graphics to my twitter and tumblr. you will need a good hook to get people interested, but also an eye-catching image that summarises the story pictorially can be a great asset (you don’t even need photoshop, just a nice moodboard will do!). when using images however, it’s always important to think how the image size will appear in tumblr’s dimensions and on your own blog … make sure it’s not stretched or the resolution too low, and create something with a good visual flow i.e. the title appears first, then the necessary information, then any teasers or extracts. you need to make your fic post stand out on someone else’s timeline, which may already be filled with a bunch of other fic posts, jostling for attention. make it neat, clean, informative, and professional.

make sure to use the tagging systems efficiently for your chosen social media platforms: only the first five tags count on a tumblr post, so choose them wisely (i.e. use the key fandom tags first and save your personal blog tags for after), and only two hashtags count on twitter before it’s marked as spam, so go for the ship tag!

creating your own fic tag on twitter can also be fun, and i’ve seen a lot more people doing it lately too. you can encourage people to tweet along with a specialised hashtag and then you can find their reaction and engage with them later, which once again expands your fandom circle and will increase engagement on tweets associated with your fic.

another trick i’ve learned is utilising time zones and understanding the demographics of the audience you’re trying to reach. i am very careful to post my fics at certain times of day in order to reach key people e.g. i will try to hit either europeans or americans during the evening, as this is when most people are home from work and wanting to read fic. as a european myself, especially involved in fandoms with high levels of european fans, i usually post during the early evening for CET time zones i.e. 7 or 8 pm and i tend to find this works for me.

with tumblr, i often delay my promo posts so that i post when it’s likely to get maximum interaction (you can see when your blog is most active using your tumblr analytics) … use your queue if need be!

i also take care in reblogging/retweeting my promo posts at certain times of day too. i will usually bump the post just before i go to bed, so as to grab americans in their early evening, and then i will bump it again in the morning when i wake up, to catch australians and west coast americans still awake. i then usually keep bumping my promos once a day for two or three days on my social media to cast a wide enough net to catch as many people who might be interested, as not everyone checks their timeline every day and social media swallows up posts so quickly, especially tumblr which is not built for original content creators to do well (lol). i will usually bump a promo post 5 - 7 times before retiring it and this is a model that’s worked well for me in the past, especially for droplets, which would get 500+ notes per chapter! if you’re anxious about this, know that most people will only see your post once or twice because tumblr moves fast and swallows posts up very quickly, and sometimes people need reminders to read if they decide to save things for later when they have more time

ii. branding

the benefits of branding mainly come from experience, so it’s a tricky thing to utilise if you haven’t published fic before … but there are still tricks worth trying!

certain fic writers will attract readers to new fics just because their name is attached to it, and people know the sort of story they’re getting, they know how it’ll be written, the sort of tropes that will appear, that sort of thing. obviously, building up this sort of brand requires publishing a lot of work, and so it must be said that practice makes perfect: the more you write and publish, the more your fics will be seen and your audience will grow. people will regularly see your username in the tags on ao3 and be more inclined to click on you as someone who reliably produces good content. it’s important to remember that everyone starts from the same place and works hard to improve their craft; success doesn’t just come overnight (unless you’re in the right place at the right time) and any creator will tell you that compliments to their talent aren’t what matters, but instead, it’s compliments to their dedication and hard graft.

another key thing about branding is how you present yourself online. the most important thing in my opinion is cohesion across your social media platforms e.g. having the same username on ao3 as you do on tumblr/twitter/wherever you promote your fic. having an easily navigatable blog with working hyperlinks and archiving of your fic work is also great. basically, building a clean interface for people to engage with your work is vital! having the same icon and username across all your social media makes it so much easier for readers to navigate between your fics and your promo posts … basically, the easier you can spell something out, the better

branding is mostly to do with how you advertise yourself, rather than the particular fic, although much of it overlaps. get your name out there by engaging with other writers and making friends and appreciating their work! this is often the best way to get inspired, plus you get to meet some amazing people. i recommend trying out for zines and big bangs and writing challenges, as these are good ways to show your work to already-established audiences. also, make yourself available by interacting with commentors or by opening up your inbox on tumblr to anons. try linking your social media and your inbox as hyperlinks in the authors note of your fic

iii. presentation

this is really fundamental and is often the main reason people will close out of your fic and not read to the end. people want to read fics that are easy to digest and have had care put into them. this includes a lot of things:

correct tagging i.e. are the tags coherent and not just rambling? are there appropriate trigger warnings in place? have you unnecessarily tagged every side pairing under the sun, rather than just the main relationship?

grammar and spelling. goes without saying … people are more likely to read things that look professional and have had care poured into their preparation. make sure you know how to use speech punctuation. revise how to use commas. avoid epithets (especially racially-aggravated ones). get yourself a beta if you’re worried, because betas are godsends!

paragraphing. so many people will close out of a fic if it isn’t correctly spaced. double spaced paragraphs look best on ao3 and i often won’t read a fic if the paragraphs are too long because it hurts my eyes to read. make sure you’re starting new speakers in new paragraphs. new ideas deserve new paragraphs. basically, every time the “camera” changes, you should be starting a new paragraph. not just a new line.

summaries. i see so many fics on ao3 with summaries that are either apologising for being bad at summaries or apologising for a fic being bad/being a first fic, and like … stop this! own what you have written, no-one else will have written it the way you have and you should be proud of it. if you’re saying in your summary that it’s a bad fic, i’m not going to click on it as a reader. instead, utilise your summary to get people hooked … good hooks can be written a load of different ways, but the best ones i see often involved a snippet from the fic as a taster, and then a couple lines of blurb. get people excited!

titles: i’m personally more likely to click on a fic where the title is either (a) correctly capitalised or (b) is clearly chosen for its aesthetic or meaning (i love long lower case titles with parentheses lol). choosing a memorable title is really helpful, especially one that can be shortened or abbreviated for social media (e.g. for hashtags)!

all this being said, traffic on ao3 is a crytpid at best and obeys little in the way of rhyme or reason. you can put blood, sweat and tears into marketing your fic, but sometimes, just being in the right place at the right time (writing for the right niche) is what does it, so being a fic writer requires a lot of patience. first and foremost, write for yourself. write what you want to read and enjoy doing it, because if you get sucked into obsessively checking stats, it’s only going to disappoint when you don’t achieve what you want to achieve.

just keep persevering and keep writing and appreciating each and every person who takes time in interact with your fic and its promos … because ultimately, all it takes it that one reader to fall head over heels in love with your fic for everything to change. for now, just be proud of your work and keep writing!

#lucy replies #writing

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misterbitches · 4 years ago

Text

i try not to be too personal-personal here cos tumblr is this thing that is the most chill for me. twitter is so hard. also tehre’s this whole fucked up panoramic thing.

but

1. i have a now defunct blog about black filmmaking. or not defunct just. unused

2. i am a filmmaker and artist; writer-director and editor specifically. do digital drawing

3. i love art. and i was a big fashion fan. that has influenced my life HEAVILY and continues to do so. it is never apolitical and is a hotbed of thought. i also love music but i dont want to do it cos i wouldnt be good and also i dont want to hate music.

3.5 i am a bigger fan of films than tv. i love film and art like i said but my rship to visual mediums has changed drastically since i decided to pursue it. because of that you will find my intense analyzation too. it becomes more abaout output and less about enjoyment because it means SO FUCKING MUCH. so when i get to observe wha ti cant do or havent created it’s a reprieve. for music i know so much less aobut it than the rest that i just stay consistently in awe

3.75 im still in awe at those better than me. but we compare ourselves to no one.

4. i had a fashion / regular blog before this. it was mcqueens. i was not internet famous but had a decent following (people are stupid.) a popular post of mine is a pic of lena dunham and taylor swift and i said grand wizards at a meeting. if you know you know

5. i don’t have an ID for leftist terms because i don’t really care. i am not a tankie but i support communism’s dream. best bet woudl be libertarian socialist.

6. i believe we’re reaching towards a world we want. so im gonna help fight for it.

7. there’s a lot of good texts out there. i only read articles and fanfic but my best friend bought ‘we do this til we free us’ by mariame kaba and im getting through it. i recommend that

8. im a wobbly

9. i type super off the cuff. stream of consciousness. i try to edit it but i wanna hvae fun. this is unfiltered me. sometimes long, sometimes short. i coudl spend hours editing and analyzing it but it’s just me here. i just wanna say what i am thinking no pressure. i can only be the woman i am. sometimes there’s a hard line of communication (people not understanding me) but i refuse to believe i am unintelligible and i have to stop internalizing that

10. going off 6, my thoughts and humor can be terrible and idk some ppl dont like it. even leftists. that’s life but my god im sorry i said money was bad why did u block me? why do u like cops?????? smdh

11. idk how i got a lot of followers on here but think of me as a mirage. a revolutionary mirage :)

12. in case it wasn’t clear, i’m black and it means a lot to me. also a fat cis woman. also means a lot to me. so when i engage, knowing my background, bitch imma lean in if i got sth to say.

13. i always say i dont know everything. i do nnot. i knwo some things about some stuff. i know what i like and what i can do. i am open to learning. i don’t have to be suuuper nice if i dont feel like it though. i dont tolerate bullshit.

14. life is awful and incredibly serious. the conundrum is genuinely not killing yourself. sisyphus! it’s heavy and fucked. but i NEED you to remember this if anything.... for me life is about dignity and doing what you want, okay? so if you get anything out of these posts just fucking laugh and have fun and nod when i say money bad. or just read it if you want. i’ve gotten so many ideas from other ppl like even storywise going through tags and have had such great food for thought. people are insane in the greatest of ways. i may seem pesimistic and melancholy but honestly im an idealist trying to live in the now. i realize that it sucks but there’s beauty in that and that’s why it’s super important to have a place for me to engage but also feel like it’s my space. its been tanquil here actually and i appreciate it even if fsr almost 400 ppl followed me. i really dont know why bc from jump i’ve just been terrible. i dont want praise unless it’s genuine so that’s not it. i have to just trust in myself more because i know my strengths but i dont trust em. i will conquer her !

15. piggybacking off hte middle of 14, I LOVE TO LAUHG. I LVOE COMEDY. i have a specific type of humor i guess. grew up on dave chappelle. arrested development, home movies. home movies isnt sociopolitical but recently i got into king of the hill and i am so impressed with it. great story telling, satire, funny, heartwarming. i love bob’s burgers too. i dont rly watch tv out of that

16. yes i love art and film yes talk to me about it if u want i can give u some recs if u want too and also we can talk and stuff abt that. maybe. and no filmmakers dont watch as many movies as u think. u probably have seen more than i have.

#i'd rather talk about moi #no i woudlnt

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astraeawrites · 8 years ago

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Hey! After following you for a while, I've become very interested in getting into the rp community. However, I have absolutely no idea how. Could you possibly give me any tips on where to begin?

astraea’s tips, tricks, & advice for new rpers !!

I’m so glad that my blog has inspired you! I can definitely offer you a few tips and give you a general idea of how and where to begin. I hope all of this helps you out, and as always, feel free to reach out to me through IMs as well. I’ve done a lot of “RP mentoring” type of things where I’ve helped new roleplayers out and it’s always been a pleasure and a great experience.

Since this list of tips is a little lengthy, I’ve placed it under a read more. But anyways, let’s begin!

❝ ※ *. : ｡ → TYPES OF ROLEPLAYS.

I believe that in order to get a good grasp of the concept of roleplaying, you need to learn about and understand the various ways you can do it. Generally speaking, there are three main ways to RP. Of course, within that, there are subcategories, but we’ll get there when we get there. Just know that you have a choice to pick where you feel most comfortable.

group roleplay.

For a long time, roleplay groups (RPGs) were relatively simple. They were broken up into two simple categories: original character (OC) and biography roleplays. How, however, it has become a little bit more complex. Skeleton roleplays and appless roleplays have quickly taken over, and for a moment, multi-muse (mumu) roleplays were popular. Of course, this most likely sounds like a load of gibberish, so let me enlighten you a little.

Roleplay groups (RPGs) ⸺ this is the umbrella term for roleplays that consist of a group of people. It acts like a network and generally speaking, the group will follow the same plot and there is a main account that represents them as a whole. if you are not in the group, then you cannot roleplay with any of the characters that are in it and vice versa; if you are in it, you cannot roleplay with people that aren’t. this is generally referred to as a closed group.

Original character roleplays (OC RP) ⸺ this is a type of RPG in which the people who wish to be a part of it are responsible for creating their own characters. each person has written their own character, and therefore, the character belongs to them. some roleplays that are mixed with biography roleplays, however, may ask you if they can keep your character as a pre-written bio if you ever chose to leave. this isn’t really common anymore, though.

Biography roleplays (bio RP) ⸺ this is a type of RPG in which the admins/creators of the roleplay are responsible for writing the characters’ biographies. not all roleplays, however, can claim ownership over the characters since some of them are fandom-based, and therefore, belong to the original content creator.

Skeleton roleplays ⸺ this is a type of RPG in which the admins/creators of the roleplay have provided a basic outline of a character. usually, these types of roleplays do not assign faceclaims to the role; instead, they make suggestions, but inevitably, do leave the faceclaim decision up to the applicant.

Appless roleplays ⸺ this is a type of RPG in which the application process is relatively simple. the application has a layout in which the information you input is the basic stuff. characters name, age, a secret or positives/negatives, and your out of character information.

Multi-muse roleplays (mumu RP) ⸺ this is a type of RPG in which the number of characters you can have is very high. in a normal roleplay, your character limit is usually anywhere from one to three. in a mumu, however, you are able to have a larger amount of characters. this is also a little tricky because i have seen mumus done in different ways. one way that is common is mumus that are set up like rpgs. another way, which is the only way i have ever done a mumu, is by connecting with a group of friends you feel comfortable with. this is an easy way to test out new ships or characters without having all the pressure of a more “professional” rpg setting.

Twitter roleplays ⸺ this is a type of RPG in which there is a main account on tumblr where you can apply, but the actual roleplay occurs on twitter. really, i’ve never been in one of these so i’m not sure how they go. i will leave a link at the end to a tutorial, though.

Now, within all of this, there are different genres you can look into. Horror, action, mystery, urban, bandom, fandom, etc. Again, the choice is yours. One thing to consider, though, is how much time you have and how much you are willing to write. Generally speaking, appless roleplays, twitter roleplays, and some OC roleplays have less writing than the others. However, this is just a generalization and does not apply to every roleplay that falls into these categories. Also, remember that no person is better than the other just because they write more or less.

independent/1x1 roleplay.

This style of roleplay is not for everyone. For some, it can be a little more intimidating than a group roleplay. To others, it can be even better than a group. It’s up to your personal preference, and within this category, you have the option of independent roleplaying, or 1x1 roleplaying. Let’s get to know both of the options.

Independent roleplay (indie RP) ⸺ this is a style of roleplay in which you are essentially creating your own rules. this, as the name suggests, grants you more freedom. in this, you are not confined to a group; therefore, you can roleplay with whoever you want. the drawback? a lot of indie roleplayers are picky with who you write you. you may see a lot of words like “selective” and “mutuals only” being used and this is simply because they create their own rules and they determine who they want to roleplay with. generally speaking, many people do pick only one character to play and choose one fandom to stick with. however, as always, this is not always the case and many people also do have “primary” characters and verses that they write in/with and “secondaries.”

1x1 roleplay (1x1 RP) ⸺ this is a style of roleplay in which you are essentially creating your own rules. this, as the name suggests, usually means that one character is roleplaying with another and you have an established writing partner a plotline. 1x1s are meticulously plotted out with a fellow writer. since there are a lot of 1x1 roleplayers, it is relatively hard to get yourself established. because of this, i do recommend being very outgoing and friendly.

Now, these styles of roleplays, in my opinion, are more difficult than RPGs. I have a hard time reaching out to RPers that I want to write with, especially if we aren’t in a group. Also, not to bash anything or give you an opinion before you can really form your own, but many fandom indie/1x1 people can be very cliquey. You’ll come to notice that there are a lot of call out posts involved with people bullying/being rude. Obviously, however, this can happen everywhere.

❝ ※ *. : ｡ → GENERAL RULES.

The majority of roleplays and people have a general understanding and a general idea of roleplay etiquette. This includes, but is not limited to:

No bullying is allowed. This is a quick way to get a call out post about you. Just be nice and don’t try to “troll” people. It really isn’t nice to get hate messages.

Don’t steal. Seriously, don’t steal characters, roleplay ideas, or themes that do not belong to you. It’s a huge no-no.

Don’t godmod. Over the years, this has developed a bit. Godmodding used to be described as writing a character who is oppressing another or controlling another person’s character. Now, assuming a person’s thoughts/actions/words is also considered godmodding. The best thing is to ask if the other person is comfortable with something or if it is within their character’s limits.

Don’t lie. This is serious. Lying, especially about your age, is wrong. If you are lying and saying you are older than you really are, you can actually get into legal trouble. This is specific toward people who are underaged and write smut. As a general rule, do not write smut unless you are 18 or older, and do not write smut with another person unless they are 18 or older.

Tag any triggers. Of course, you may forget or you may not be aware of what other people may consider a trigger, but do your best. And FYI, tag your triggers with the trigger first. For example: blood tw. See? Blood is put before the tw and this is primarily because blacklist will only pick up the first word of a tag. At least, that’s what people have been saying? Not sure, but still, do it just to be safe.

Organization. I’m not saying this is necessary, but it is appreciated. Having a tag system is great because it can allow others to navigate your blog easily. Also, have a neat and clean theme that has legible text.

Cut your posts. Cutting your posts means that only the 2 most recent replies are included in the post. This means the other person’s last reply and your reply. I’ll provide a link to a tutorial at the end.

❝ ※ *. : ｡ → FRIENDLY REMINDERS.

A lot of people forget these things, so I think it’s important to get them ingrained into your system before you start!

First and foremost, this is for fun. If you find yourself getting stressed or anxious, stop, take a break, and focus on what really matters. Roleplaying is an outlet, and therefore, should be something that relaxes you. If you need to quit an RPG because life is too busy, do it. If you need to drop plots, do it. The group and your writing partners will understand, and if they don’t, well, they probably aren’t people you should be associating with, to begin with.

Only take on what you can handle. Don’t be afraid to say no to plotting, especially with indies or 1x1s. If you have too much going on, politely decline and offer to plot when you have free time.

Aesthetic isn’t everything. I know people that don’t like those contained themes but use it because people will only RP with them if they have a contained theme with nice graphics. That logic is flawed because people shouldn’t want to roleplay with you because you have a nice aesthetic. They should roleplay with you because of a connection.

Getting your application rejected isn’t the end of the world. If you get rejected, you can always ask why or what you can improve upon. Take the opportunity to improve your writing and general understanding of concepts. I’ve personally been rejected about four times from roleplays, two of which happened last year when I had about 5 years of experience on my hand. It really isn’t the end of the world and a lot of times, it’s just because the admins felt that another person had a better understanding of the character, not because your writing “sucks.”

If you feel insecure about your writing, that doesn’t mean you have to stop. Be observant and look at the way other people write and see if there’s something lacking in your own. Maybe your writing is clouded with purple prose or maybe your narratives aren’t descriptive enough. Always be observant and try to improve, don’t give up right away.

❝ ※ *. : ｡ → HELPFUL LINKS.

This is just a short compliation of helpful links to get you started!

RP Terms (fuckyeahroleplayadvice)

Roleplaying 101 (rpstagram)

How to Twitter RP (kcliuchis)

Extremely Basic Roleplay Basics (rpedia)

Writing Problems I Noticed In My Own Writing (blackgirlmagicwrites)

How to Set Up Your Blog / Reply Using xKit (thcojamcs)

Writing Good Thread Replies (duorpt)

How to Roleplay on the Mobile Tumblr App (valofrph)

Cutting Posts (ronweasleywrites)

Tips for Writing RP Starters (forfriendshipbutter-blog)

Indie and 1x1 Roleplaying (sgomezofrpharchive)

Become More Confident in Your Writing (astraeawrites)

❝ ※ *. : ｡ → HELPFUL BLOGS.

This is a short compilation of highly imformative and helpful blogs.

@dear-indies

@helpersofindie

@margotofrph

@roleplaytipsandadvice

@nphofrph

@sonamhelps

@lisbugrph

@eternalroleplay

@psychictwinsrph

@lashton-ofrph

@annielovestohelp

Again, feel free to IM me. I deeply enjoy helping out new roleplayers and I’ll even plot with you if you want to get into 1x1s and practice roleplaying against me before you dive head first into the RP community! I hope this helped you out in some way or another.

#rph #rpc #writing help #rp guide #how to rp #m #m:guide #answered #anonymous

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lgdays · 7 years ago

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NOTES FROM THE EARLY DAYS (PART IV)

BUILDING AN AUDIENCE

Now that I had a couple of screenshots and concepts, it was time to share what I had been doing, and see if there was any interest in a non-fantasy modern-day RPG. In this article I’ll be sharing some numbers hopefully to serve as a reference point, as these numbers are usually not made public.

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V (in process)

The first step was to start a devlog. I decided to use tumblr instead of Wordpress or my own domain, so people could easily find those posts and engage with them. It’s important to note that people are less likely to use those Share buttons than to simply like/reblog within the platform.

Starting a Devlog

It’s common to hear people wondering when is the best time to start posting about their projects. In my opinion, the earlier you start posting, the more time you’ll have to build up an audience, so the earlier the better. In fact, showing your projects at their early stages will allow you to get feedback at a pertinent time.

The first post I made was an introduction to the story and the characters, with some concepts and really early screenshots. All of the art I posted there ended up being replaced in the end, though, like the in-game menu below:

Now, even though I said you should start as soon as possible, there are still some recommendations. When you start developing, it’s easy to overpromise, but try to make sure you’ll be able to develop the main features you’ll use to promote the game, otherwise you are off to a bad start.

Reception of the First Public Announcement

In all honesty, I had very low expectations, I hoped I would get at least 10 likes and no hate mail. I panicked wondering if I should really publish it as it is. As it was my first post, even if people hated it, I wasn’t risking too much. If anything, I could always make a better post later.

Contrary to my expectations, within the first day people where liking and sharing the post. Within the first 10 days, there were already over a hundred notes, and some people even took the time to leave some really nice comments. Frankly, the game wouldn’t be the same if I hadn’t posted those screenshots online back then.

Spreading the Word

After the reception on tumblr, I had enough confidence to post about it on more sites. The ones that made a difference were the following sites:

TIG Source: This is one of the most popular forums for indiedevs. Popular indie games like Papers, Please, Owlboy, Rain World and even FEZ had their own threads there during development. TIG Source also has a Screenshot Thread.

RPG Maker forums: As far as I’m aware, every game engine has its own forum, so it’s a good idea to start there. In the case of RPG Maker, they have their own rules about the content required to make your own thread, so it’s easier to write an introduction using that as a guide.

IndieDB: As the name suggest, this is a database for indie games. It allows you to create a devlog, upload a presskit, and make announcements that will be displayed on the frontpage for a couple of hours. A lot of journalists (and bots) browse the frontpage, so it’s a good place to post if you hope to appear in the media.

Reddit (/r/gamedev & /r/rpgmaker): Both subreddits have their own Screenshot Saturday threads. Posting as early as the thread is up is your best bet, as these threads tend to get crowded. There are also genre specific subreddits that are good for big updates.

Now, while the 4 sites listed above are a good place to start, it’s important to keep in mind most of the people who browse the sites above are developers or people who work/want to work in the industry.

From all of these sites, TIG Source was the one were Long Gone Days got more reach. Within the next days, composers, sound designers, voice actors and publishers were reaching out to be part of the project. Soon after, the game got its very own first article on Siliconera: “Long Gone Days, An RPG With A Story 12 Years In The Making” by Chris Priestman.

Reaching Potential Players

Unless your game is targeted towards a really obscure niche, your best bet is to use the most popular social media platforms. I initially used Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook, so these are the ones I’ll be comparing.

1) Tumblr

On Tumblr the follower growth was quick. Without much effort, posting once per week, and relying mostly on 3 tags (#gamedev, #pixelart, #rpgmaker), within the first months there were on average 300 new followers monthly, and then it got on an average of 90~150 new followers per month. We also found a lot of loyal fans here, and there’s a big sense of community for story-driven games. By the first semester I was reaching about 1,500 followers here.

I noticed that posting videos or static images on tumblr didn’t go too well. GIFs on the other hand always resulted in at least 100 notes.

2) Twitter

On Twitter, contrary to my expectations, the follower growth was a bit slower. It takes more effort, as you need to tweet more often and you only have 140 characters to get your point across, but there’s a wider audience you can reach. The first months were slow, with a growth of 100~150 new followers per month, and mostly by using tags like #screenshotsaturday, #gamedev and #pixelart. By the first semester I was barely reaching the first thousand followers.

After reaching the first thousand though, the growth was way faster, and nowadays it’s the fastest growing platform Long Gone Days is on. Since numbers on Twitter are public, they affect how people see you.

3) Facebook

On Facebook, during the first few months, it would have felt like a ghost town if it wasn’t for my friends (thanks ♥!). Checking some Facebook pages of popular indie games in development, things were pretty similar, unless they used the “share+like+comment to win/vote” tactic. By the first semester I was barely reaching the first 800 followers.

Something that really helped me reach more people was to talk about the game on Facebook groups (mostly gamedev or engine oriented groups). I haven’t yet used promoted posts, as those should be saved for big announcements, but I’ll do my best to share the results if we do.

There are of course a lot more things you can do to improve your reach, like taking into consideration the time and day of the week you post, the amount of words you use, using GIFs instead of videos or static images, but I can expand on that on another post if there’s enough interest.

Conclusions

Before I started releasing info about the project online, I expected to see the worst, but I was overwhelmed with the support that we got. There were a few hateful comments as well, but they unknowingly gave us tons of useful feedback.

This goes without saying, but avoid getting into fights and be open to critiques. You don’t have to do everything the way some people want it to be, but they might be able to tell you the things your friends are afraid to say.

Releasing something that took you months or even years of effort is really overwhelming, it makes you feel exposed and vulnerable. Showing others your progress as you go really helps to reduce the emotional stress you could have once you release the completed piece.

With all of the feedback I got during the first few month, I had less worries on my mind, and it even motivated me to work even faster so I could share more stuff. Now all I had to worry about was the next big milestone: Releasing the demo.

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V (in process)

The next part of the series will be about the release of the demo (what do to before, during and after).

#pixel art #gamedev #video games #game development #long gone days

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verdiprati · 8 years ago

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Thirteen ways to approach your favorite opera singers

In 2013 when I went from a casual opera fan to a more committed one and joined the Tumblr opera community, I wanted very much to meet the opera singer I idolized, but I did not know how to go about it. At the time, I had seen some corrective advice on Tumblr about how NOT to interact with your favorite opera stars, but it would have helped me if someone had spelled out in positive terms some of the social norms of opera fan/star interaction so that I would know what was possible.

Four years and many opera adventures later, I’ve learned a lot that I wish I could convey to my past self. Since I can’t go back in time, I’m writing up this post to offer a few pointers to newer fans.

This advice is mostly based on my personal observations and I’m definitely open to other viewpoints and additional information. If the detailed explanations all seem obvious to you, then you are probably not the target audience for this post! It is meant for people who want to make a connection with their favorite opera stars but feel mystified and intimidated by the world of professional opera singers.

FIRST: SOME GENERAL ADVICE.

Having strong feelings about opera and about your favorite artists does not make you “creepy.” For one thing, opera is meant to stir feelings such as love and sadness. For another thing, celebrity crushes are perfectly normal. Even celebrities get celebrity crushes.

What makes a person “creepy” is behavior that shows a disregard for other people’s feelings, time, or privacy.

There is a long tradition of opera fans showing love for their favorite stars. It is fine to express your enthusiasm for opera and for your favorite artists, and it is totally normal to want to meet them! (It is also OK to not want to meet them; some people prefer to keep their idols on a distant pedestal.) Just always stay attentive to the artist’s signals. If you know that you have difficulty reading social cues, you might even want to ask for guidance from someone you trust who can help you with social steering.

That being said, I have observed an odd twist to fan/artist interaction: sometimes fans approach artists with excessive caution and reserve, understating their own desire to connect with the artist, feigning nonchalance or saying things along the lines of “we could meet just for a minute really quickly if you want.” I think artists can sometimes misread these signals and get the impression that a person is not really a fan and would actually rather be elsewhere, which could be a little hurtful. Yes, definitely respect performing artists’ time and feelings and privacy; sure, hold back from fawning and gushing over the artists if you think you would embarrass yourself; but there is a virtue in simply and straightforwardly telling someone that you admire them, that you are honored (or would be honored) to meet them, and that you would really love to have a photo of yourself with them or their autograph as a memento of the occasion.

=== THIRTEEN WAYS TO APPROACH YOUR FAVORITE OPERA SINGERS ===

First part: some things you can do even if you are not able to go to your favorite artists’ shows in person.

1. LINK UP WITH OTHER FANS. Look around on social media. The most prominent opera stars tend to have communities of fans gathered around them. Singers are individuals and they can have different quirks in how they interact with the public. Your best information about your favorite singers may come from other fans. If you join a community and earn some trust you may get to hear about other fans’ close encounters of the operatic kind.

2. INTERACT ON SOCIAL MEDIA. Some opera singers have a personal presence on social media; some do not. You should be able to tell whether a singer manages their own Twitter, Instagram, fan page on Facebook, etc, or leaves it in the hands of a PR professional. Many singers are approachable this way. They do not necessarily owe you a response if you tweet at them or comment on their posts, but I see a lot of genial fan-artist interactions online, and those can result in the artist recognizing you if you finally get to meet them in real life. (This has happened to me more than once! Val has a cute story about it too.)

If your circumstances allow it, I recommend using your real name and/or photo for any social media accounts that you use to interact with your favorite artists. I think it fosters trust and helps them feel that they are talking to a real person.

As for what kinds of things to say to artists (or when tagging / @-mentioning them) on social media, I have three rules that I try to follow:

Keep it positive.

When in doubt, keep it positive.

You are allowed to have critical opinions, of course! But you can be selective about where you express them. If you trash a singer’s colleagues—not just other singers but also, for example, the director or costume designer for their current show—on their Facebook fan page or in a tweet @-mentioning them, you put them in an awkward position: if they “like” your comment, it may appear that they are publicly endorsing your criticism of the people they work with.

It is good to keep compliments 100% unambiguously positive, too. I’ve seen singers react with hurt feelings to social media comments that were clearly meant to be compliments, but that were phrased in a sort of backhanded or sardonic way. Clear and sincere expressions of enthusiasm never go amiss.

3. KNOW WHO THE ARTIST’S AGENT IS. This is not in itself a way of approaching your favorite opera singers, but you may need this information if you want to send fan mail or a backstage request. Here are the artist rosters for some of the larger agencies: IMG Artists, Askonas Holt, Harrison Parrott, and Maxine Robertson Management. If your fave does not appear on those lists, try googling “[artist name] agent”. Normally each artist’s webpage on the agent’s site will have contact information for the main person who represents them.

4. SEND FAN MAIL. Sending a letter of admiration written on actual dead-tree paper is still a time-honored and perfectly acceptable way of reaching out to let an artist know that they have inspired you or touched your heart. If you cannot find contact information on the singer’s website, you can email their agent and ask where to send fan mail for them. Keep your letter reasonably succinct and focused on the artist’s work and its importance to you.

5. PETITION LOCAL ORGANIZATIONS TO BRING YOUR FAVORITE ARTIST TO TOWN. I am not sure how often this works, but it can’t hurt, right?!

Make a list of opera companies, orchestras, and concert/recital series near you that regularly hire artists of similar professional esteem to your fave. (This last point is important—some smaller organizations do not have the resources to bring in A-list artists, and it is best to make a proposal only if the organization could realistically fulfill it.) Then write polite, formal letters or emails to those organizations naming your favorite artist, explaining why you think the artist would be a good fit for the organization and its audience, and saying how much you would love to see this artist perform there. Without going overboard, you may back up your case with one or two YouTube links or quotes from recent reviews.

You might not get a reply and you might not see instant results, since classical music and opera programming is often planned years in advance. However, you have little to lose—the worst case scenario is that your request gets ignored. The potential upside, if your favorite singer comes to perform near you, is awesome.

Second part: some things you can do if your favorite artists come to perform in your area, or if you are able to travel to see their shows.

6. GO TO CD SIGNINGS. Although they cannot be expected at every show, CD signings, when offered, typically take place in the lobby of the theater immediately following a concert or opera. Signings may or may not be announced in advance. In my experience there are always CDs for sale so you can buy one to be signed on the spot. There are not always credit card readers, though, so take cash to every concert if you want to be able to seize the opportunity. (The price for CDs is typically rounded off to $15 or $20 in the US.)

There may be a sign or announcement saying that the artist will only sign the specific CD they are promoting. In the absence of any such declaration, though, it is generally OK to bring your own CD, photograph, or other material for the artist to sign, or you can get them to sign your copy of the program or cast sheet. (I even saw a necktie being signed by the artist in one case, and I have to assume there have been far stranger requests.) For convenience, you can bring the booklet from a CD and leave the actual disc and jewel case at home.

It is also usually acceptable—unless there is an announcement to the contrary—to ask if the artist would be willing to pose for a quick photo or selfie with you. It is acceptable to ask, but the answer may not always be yes; if the artist demurs, be prepared to wave off your request and reiterate your thanks for the signing.

You will probably have a chance to chat very briefly with the artist. Be mindful of the line of people behind you as well as of the artist’s time; keep your remarks short and light. If your opera idol’s co-stars or accompanist are doing signings at the same table, be gracious to them; say thanks or “bravo” for the performance and collect their autograph(s) on your program.

I am still not sure of the etiquette about how many signatures you can ask an artist for at once, but one autograph is certainly the norm and I personally would place the max at two (e.g. asking the artist to sign one item for yourself and one for an absent friend who is a huge fan). Be prepared to give a name for the artist to dedicate each item to.

Bonus tip: Bring a spare Sharpie just in case. You may become the hero of the hour. (I have been the Sharpie-supplying hero on more than one occasion!)

7. GO TO PUBLIC Q&A SESSIONS, AUDIENCE TALK-BACK EVENTS, AND SIMILAR. Although this type of supplemental programming is sometimes announced months in advance along with the opera or concert in question, it often is added to the calendar on relatively short notice. If you have tickets to a performance, check the sponsoring organization’s website and social media frequently in the week or two leading up to the performance date.

If audience interaction is invited, you have a great opportunity to talk to your favorite artist about a topic you both care about: their professional work. Come with a few questions in mind but be aware that the moderator may steer conversation in certain directions. If you are called on to ask a question, you may briefly introduce yourself and say how much you admire the artist, but keep these statements really short. Really, really short. Then move on to your question.

It is not unusual for the artist(s) to hang around for a few minutes after a Q&A type of event and chat with audience members. If you see them doing this, go ahead and walk up to say “thank you for taking my question” or “I just want to say how awesome you are.” Just be respectful of the artist’s time and of other people’s desire for access to the artist.

8. TAKE CURTAIN CALL PHOTOS (OR VIDEOS) AND SHARE THEM ON SOCIAL MEDIA. This is the one thing I have done that has resulted in opera singers contacting ME out of the blue (!!!), asking for higher-res copies or permission to republish my photos of them taking their bows. Some singers don’t seem to care about curtain call photos, but many value them as mementos of their performances.

There is one major rule to follow: it is very important to wait until the performance has ended and the applause has started before you even take out your phone or camera and point it at the stage. Taking photos or videos during a performance is strongly frowned upon and can distract and anger the performers as well as your fellow audience members.

Many venues have signs or program notes saying that all photography is forbidden inside the auditorium. Despite these warnings, I have never had an usher try to stop me from taking curtain call photos, and even venues with these warnings have retweeted my curtain call photos, which I take as a form of tacit approval. Obviously, if any theater official asks you to stop taking photos, you should comply immediately.

Minjaš Žugić has made a real art form out of his curtain call portrait photography. His work is inspirational, but keep in mind that it is the result of years of investment in photographic equipment, editing software, and skill development. The average opera fan takes much humbler cell phone pictures, and that’s just fine.

9. SEND A NOTE OR GIFT BACKSTAGE. Like fan mail, this is a time-honored tradition!

What to send? A brief note expressing your excitement for the show and wishing the artist “toi toi toi” or “in bocca al lupo” (the opera world’s phrases for good luck) is always welcome! The artist will be busy getting ready for the show, mentally and physically, so you might want save your longer correspondence for fan mail.

It is not necessary to spend money on a gift; a note alone is perfectly good. However, if you have the means and want to send something, a bouquet of flowers is very traditional; goodies like a box of sweets or a bottle of champagne are also well within the norm. If you have artsy skills, small handcrafts are also nice.

One thing to keep in mind: if an artist is performing on tour, they may not be able to take hard-to-pack items like bouquets or bottles with them when they leave. That may be fine with you—they can simply enjoy the flowers in their dressing room, for instance—or you may want to come up with something more portable.

How to send? The simplest way is to drop off your note and/or gift at the stage door in person. The larger opera houses and concert halls will generally have a guard or receptionist stationed just inside the stage door in the hours before a performance. Locate the stage door by asking at the box office, walking around the theater, or googling “[venue name] stage door.” Walk in and state that you would like to leave a note or gift for so-and-so. This is pretty normal—I have never had the request declined. It helps if your note or gift is clearly labeled with the artist’s name. You generally will not be invited in to deliver the item to the artist yourself; the venue staff will take it to them.

Leave plenty of time before the performance (say, 30-60 minutes) for making the drop-off. Front-of-house staff like ushers, coat-check attendants, and box office workers probably will not be in a position to take items backstage to the artist.

If you are dealing with a smaller venue that might not have a stage door receptionist, or if you are in any doubt about approaching the stage door, contact the venue’s business office by phone or email a few business days in advance. Explain that you are looking forward to so-and-so’s performance on such-and-such date (be specific!); mention that you would like to drop off a note, bouquet, or small gift if acceptable; and ask how best to go about it.

You should also call or email the venue well in advance if you want to have something delivered to the stage door (e.g. by a local florist, or by a carrier such as FedEx) on your behalf; they will be able to give you the correct addressing information. They may want you to use an address for the stage door or loading dock that is not published on the venue’s website.

10. BRING A NOTE OR GIFT UP TO THE STAGE AT CURTAIN CALL. This is something I have seen on a few occasions, though I have not tried it myself: instead of sending a note, bouquet of flowers, or small gift backstage, a member of the audience will sometimes carry it up to the edge of the stage during curtain calls and offer it directly to the artist.

This strategy seems like it must work best at venues without orchestra pits. There is also a tradition of flinging flowers across the pit to the stage when a favorite opera star steps out for their curtain call, but that seems less personal—the artist might not see where the flowers are coming from.

11. STAGE-DOOR YOUR FAVORITE ARTISTS. Stage-dooring refers to the practice of fans congregating outside the stage door after a show with the hope of briefly meeting the stars on their way out of the venue. It seems to be common at some of the major opera houses such as the Met and the Royal Opera, and if you spend any time browsing opera fans’ social media, you will see stage door selfies and group photos.

This is actually not something I have done myself, so I have limited advice on precisely how to go about it. Perhaps someone else can chime in?

As in any other situation, stage door behavior should be respectful of the artist’s time and feelings. Address the artist as “Ms. ---” or “Mr. ---” (or “Signora,” “Monsieur,” “Dame,” etc., as applicable!) to get their attention, unless you are already on a first-name basis. Ask politely for what you would like: “Would it be all right if I took a photo?” “Would you have time for a selfie?” “Would you be willing to autograph my program?” If the artist says she is tired or in a hurry, thank her for the performance and let her go. If the artist spends time with you and gives you an autograph, a selfie, or a bit of conversation, remember to thank her for that, too.

12. ATTEND POST-SHOW RECEPTIONS AND MEET-THE-ARTIST PARTIES. These events may or may not be well publicized in advance. Sometimes meet-the-artist events are by invitation only to high-level donors, but sometimes they are open to all ticket holders for a show. Sometimes there are post-show receptions with no formal “meet the artist” component arranged by the venue, but the artists might choose to put in an appearance.

I have had some very lovely chats with favorite singers over post-show drinks and I recommend sticking around for any receptions that you have the opportunity to enjoy!

As for how to approach artists at these events, it is like any other cocktail party or similar social situation, though with the slight twist that a star artist’s attention may be under more demand than other people’s. Sidle up and wait for a break in conversation. When the artist turns your way, say hello, introduce yourself, and tell them what a fantastic performance they just gave. Positive feedback and compliments are very much in order, especially in the hours immediately after a show!

You will have to read the situation a little bit to gauge how long to chat with the artist—try not to take longer than other people are doing, which could be anywhere from under a minute of quick greeting / admiration to several minutes of casual, wide-ranging conversation, depending what the event is like and how mobbed the artist is. If the artist seems to be hanging out with family or personal friends, err on the side of keeping your interaction brief.

I think it is generally OK to ask for an autograph or a selfie or offer the artist a fan letter or small gift at this kind of event: it is a form of compliment, and most artists are happy to oblige. Just keep in mind that it is primarily a social event and not a CD signing line. Make sure the artist gets time to chat with people and enjoy the party.

13. MAKE A BACKSTAGE REQUEST. If there is a singer who would be really special for you to meet, you can straight up ask for the opportunity to meet them. I really wish I had known this earlier! There is no guarantee that your request will be accepted, but it does not hurt to ask. The most standard sort of request is to ask if you may meet the artist backstage after a show.

I would generally recommend contacting the singer or their agent about two weeks in advance of the show you are going to see. If you can find direct contact information for the singer on their website, or if you are able to send them private messages online, you can go that route; otherwise, send an email to their agent. Making your request via a private channel of communication is best, since it might be awkward for the artist to respond to a public request on social media.

Keep your message businesslike and to the point. Here is a template based on emails I have sent to artists’ agents:

Subject: backstage request for [singer’s name] on [date] at [venue]

Hello,

I have been greatly impressed by [singer]'s work and I am very much looking forward to her recital at [venue] on [date]. Would I be able to meet her backstage briefly afterward, to say a word of admiration and perhaps request an autograph?

Thank you,

[my real name]

Allow about three business days for an answer to come back. After that point, if you have heard nothing, you may send a single, polite follow-up query; sometimes messages get lost in the shuffle. However, if your followup also gets no reply, I would read that silence as a “no.”

If your request is accepted, probably the artist will put your name on their backstage list. In most venues, access to the backstage area is restricted, and you will not be admitted backstage unless your name is “on the list.”

When the show ends, approach an usher and explain that you have arranged to meet the artist backstage, and ask where you should go. Go promptly after curtain down, but make sure and stop to collect any belongings you may have left at coat check, because it may close before you are done backstage.

When you get to the backstage entrance (which will probably be an interior door, not the exterior stage door), give your name to the guard and mention which artist you are there to see.

What the backstage experience is like will depend on numerous factors: How many people were onstage? How prestigious are the performers? Are you in a big city at a major opera house or at a smallish auditorium on a college campus seeing a show on tour? Are you part of a small crowd gathering to meet your opera idol, or is it just you? In some cases, the artist or the venue may have assistants guiding you around. In other cases, once you are through the door, you are more or less on your own. You might meet the artist at their dressing room, in the green room, or in a hallway. They may have changed to street clothes by the time you get there or they may still be in costume or in their concert clothes. They may be drinking champagne and celebrating the performance with their castmates or they may be exhausted and yearning for their hotel bed.

Despite the difficulty of generalizing about the backstage experience, the menu of common fan/star interactions is still similar to other in-person events. Lead off by introducing yourself and congratulating the artist on the performance they have just given. Say something about how much you admire them and why you wanted to meet them. You may offer a bouquet of flowers or another small gift if you have brought one, or a fan letter for the artist to read later, but it is certainly not required that you bring the artist anything. You can ask for an autograph or a selfie with the artist if you wish, or you can chat for a bit and say “I just wanted to tell you in person how much I admire you,” and leave it at that.

As always, be respectful not only of the artist but also of the other people in the room. Assume that everyone you meet backstage is someone important who has a good reason for being there.

With regard to the length of your visit, take cues from the artist and from the other people around you. When you sense that your time is up, thank the artist sincerely for their time and make for the exit. Congratulations! You have just met one of your favorite singers. Bask in the glow. :)

#opera tag #advice from verdiprati #advice

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vickypritchard · 5 years ago

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Website Hosting/Social Media

Website: To make my website, I will be using Tumblr. I have decided to use Tumblr because it is free and easy to access and I have started to understand how the platform works through making my blog. Tumblr is known for having a lot of creative accounts and active viewers which makes it a good place for people such as myself to get noticed.

http://vickypritchard.co.uk

This is the first layout design for my website, this layout is the automatic one that Tumblr has installed onto each blog/website that begins. I had to change this layout because it is dull and doesn’t reflect my brand well. I liked the use of a large banner in the top of the page to show off my logo or work, but felt the rest of the website lacked in design and wasn’t visually pleasing.

This was my second layout design for my website, I quite liked the layout of the website, but not so much the colours. Once I had gained feedback from my presentation, stating that the website didn’t look professional and looked more like a blog. I decided to research different websites to help me create a website that reflected my brand well and was easy to access. Research website 1: https://fitsmallbusiness.com/what-makes-a-good-website/

According to this list on what makes a good website, I think the most important things I will need to consider are; - Add social media accounts to show off your work, link everything - social media accounts to website and website to social media accounts. - Make my website mobile friendly. - Showcase who you are by using a bio, this is a good way for companies to know about you without having to do a lot of searching If I use these three rules when making my website I think my website will come across professional, provided it has a good design layout.

Research website 2: https://www.nowness.com/

I think this is a good example of a professional design layout I have found, the company is called Nowness, what I like about this website is the organised, separate boxes that easily show what each project is and what work belongs in each section. I am going to try and apply this format to my website as I feel this is professional, especially if I can title each piece of work and write about it.

Social Media: All social media I currently have is for my personal use only and is private, I have SnapChat (used for communicating), FaceBook (which I have not posted anything on for over a year), Messenger (used for communicating) and Instagram (where I post on average every six months). I have no professional public accounts where I can show my work or experiences to others I do not know. This needs to change as social media in all of the creative industries is extremely useful as it is a way to meet others in the same industry you are interested in. and to show off your work to others - such as possible employers and if they like your work, they are able to contact you. Depending on the industry you want to work in will depend on what sort of social media you should use, for example, if you are an aspiring illustrator, Instagram would be best as it is used to post images giving illustrators a chance to show off their drawings with descriptions and tags. As there are so many different types of social media, I need to research each one and decide which would be best to use for the industry I am interested in - ‘Sound in the Film industry’, when I know which ones I want to use I can then make my accounts. It is important to not make too many social media accounts as I would not be able to keep all of them up to date, therefore I will only make one or two if they are suitable.

For the industry I want to work in, I think the best three social media options for me to use would be Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. Twitter would be useful to me as it is a platform that can reach a wider audience, such as possible clients or employers who can look at my work. Twitter is also a good way to gain feedback on work as it is public. Disadvantages of Twitter however, is that negative comments/feedback can be posted, and maintaining a good, active Twitter account is very time consuming. LinkedIn is a very beneficial business/client based social media as you can connect with others in the same field of interest as you, you can research businesses and you can find extensive job listings in your area. The only disadvantage of LinkedIn is that you have to pay if you want LinkedIn Premium, however this is not a requirement. Instagram is one of the best social medias to share photographs or images of your own work, it can easily be noticed with hashtags/account tags to the photograph, which when people type, allows your work to come up - providing your account is public. However, a disadvantage I would find with this social media in the industry I want to work in, is that the type of work I create is part of films/videos, and although videos can be added to Instagram, they have a 60 second time frame unless you use an IGTV app, which doesn't have as many users.

Based off of the research I have done for the three social media platforms I could have used, I have decided I will use Twitter to show my work, experiences I am pursuing and projects I am working on as this would be the best way to get noticed and get the most accurate, honest feedback to my work. I will also be making a LinkedIn account to connect with people in the industry I want to work in, I plan to make my LinkedIn account full of information about me, the more information shown, the more likely you are to get connections. When making these accounts, it is important to use the same name as my domain name ‘Vicky Pritchard’ so that my branding is consistent and my work can be linked to one specific name belonging to me.

Social Media Research - Sound Twitter accounts https://twitter.com/Studiocitysound

This is an example Twitter case study account I have researched for a company called ‘Studio City Sound’. I wanted to look up example of sound based Twitter accounts to see what sort of content they post, who they are following and what sort of image they send across. When I look at this Twitter account, it is clear to me they post about once a week - on average. They are following a lot of other sound based company - perhaps supporting each other. The content they usually post is of upcoming projects or work they have released and is usually followed by a lot of hashtags, which helps promote their work and posts.

Social Media Research - Sound Twitter accounts https://twitter.com/AbbeyRoad

This is another example Twitter account case study I have researched for a company called ‘Abbey Road Studios’. I wanted to research two different Twitter accounts and compare them to see if they are similar or different in promotion, followers and what they post. When I look at this Twitter account it is clear to me they are very professional and successful, they have over 100,000 followers and are only following 55 people, meaning that they don’t need to try and persuade people with followings. The people they do follow seem to be people that work for the company or other big sound based studios. Their posts are also behind the scenes work of what they are currently creating or of work they have released, they don’t seem to use hashtags either which could help them promote their company further.

Social Media Research - Sound LinkedIn accounts https://www.linkedin.com/company/pro-sound-effects/

Besides Twitter accounts, I also wanted to research LinkedIn accounts to see how they compare to my account and what they include on their page. The first LinkedIn account I am looking at is ‘Pro Sound Effects’ a company that creates sound effects for software and artists. This page has over 6,000 followers and they seem to post about once or twice a week, when they do post they seem to promote a lot of their work or ‘how to’ posts to do with sound or sound effects. Their website is also linked at the very top of their page - which I also have in my ‘contact info’ at the top of my LinkedIn page.

Social Media Research - Sound LinkedIn accounts https://www.linkedin.com/company/abbey-road-studios/

This is the second LinkedIn account I decided to research, this account I am looking at is ‘Abbey Road Studios’, the same company I researched for my Twitter page. This page does not have as many followings as it does on Twitter, but this could be because Twitter is a bigger platform with more people using it. Their LinkedIn page has a post added to it once a week on average and it seems to be of work they have done or achievements. Their website is also linked at the top of their LinkedIn page which is best for promotion.

Twitter: Twitter is a good way for people to expand their audience and grow as a brand or a person through posts and tags that people are interested in. On Twitter, you can add photographs and videos with a short caption and tags to communicate and show off your work. Twitter is a good way to also receive feedback on your work, due to such a large audience.

This is the basic set up of my new Twitter account, as you can see it is a work in progress with one tweet, a profile picture and background image added. My background image is my logo and my profile picture is a portrait of me, that has been used in my website and LinkedIn account. I need to add a lot of ‘about me’ information, (my birthday, website, bio and location). Once my account is set up I need to start adding my work to it, the more I post on this account, the more chance I have of connecting to others and increasing my following. I will also need to follow people in the industry I am interested in. I plan to post on this account once or twice a week with previews/clips of my work and text based posts, and once or twice a month with new completed projects. Sound projects are very time consuming so I will have to try and post when I can.

Twitter: This is the link to the final set up for my Twitter account. The account shows my logo, information about me, my bio and contains a link to my website I am currently making. I think that Twitter will be a good way to get honest feedback in my work and connect with others that are interested in the same area of work as me. I plan to follow even more people than I currently am at the moment and keep it updated with new upcoming plans and projects I am working on. By doing this I hope to increase my following and increase the quality of my work.

@VickyPritchard_

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a good way for people to expand their links in the field they are interested in through ‘connections’ you can find of people with similar interests to you. On LinkedIn, you can add a lot of information about you such as your CV, education, location, occupation, photograph, an about you section and work experience. Which is a good way for employers to find out information about you and are then able to contact you if your profile fits their brief.

This is the basic set up of my new LinkedIn account, it is a work in progress and as you can see it shows my new email address that I have made for professional use, my name, what University I go to along with my degree and where I live. I need to add my logo, a profile picture and a lot more information about me.

LinkedIn: This is a link to the final set up for my LinkedIn account. It shows my logo, information about me, my interests and desired area of work. I think that LinkedIn will be a good way to connect with people in the area of work I am interested in, I plan to keep it updated with new information and experiences I am learning, hopefully by doing this I will be able to show off my work to others through links, such as my website and Twitter and gain connections with others.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/vicky-pritchard-b5babb190

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ark-of-eden · 8 years ago

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R is drunk and raving (not in the party way).

(R:) Additionally, I’m procrastinating like a fucking champion at working on fic construction, so you know the best use of my time is going off about random social media crap on the internet.

tl;dr: Putting all commentary in tags on Tumblr makes R cry and shit thousands of words into the Internet.

Every social media site inevitably develops sets of unwritten social conventions. Some of them actually make sense as being derived from meatspace etiquette and therefore you don’t really have to stress about remembering them as long as you play nice like a decent creature.

And some of them just don’t make any fucking sense that I can see. Folks on Twitter using a deliberately space-limited form of media to write a page’s worth or more in a string of 30+ rapidfire tweets? This is just how it’s done over there? (Tweetlonger exists but for some reason these massive chain-tweeters never seem to use it. Same with posting the whole thing in a long-form site like LJ/DW/Tumblr and just linking it to a tweet.)

And Tumblr has things that I literally had to put effort into learning after I migrated here, and after I learned about them I frankly decided to ignore them because I couldn’t see the point in them. Tumblr has this bizarre allergy to commentary and, likely derived from that, the practice of instead commenting by putting it all in awkward tags that render the tagging system not especially useful and are harder to get to if you’re actually interested in an individual’s thoughts about a thing and not just the twelfth instance of the same post crossing your dash in a day or two. It’s not like you can’t engage with people, because asks and messaging and such exist, but like...there’s this strong sense that it’s Terribly Ill-Mannered to weigh in with your own impressions right there, in the body of the post, typing your own words in that seductive, wide-open text box that appears all on its own when you go to reblog something. The properly-socialized Tumblrite eschews that tempting text field and instead posts weird sentence fragments in tag form (interspersed with actual tags that might serve to usefully categorize the post’s content), to the extent that some people can add on a good couple paragraphs of material down among the hashtags where others need to go looking for it on purpose if they want it. (I, at least, haven’t been able to find a plugin or something that automatically expands full tags on all posts so that I don’t have to fuck around with extra interface elements to get to them. I admit that I haven’t looked super hard, though.)

Preserving the original form of the OP’s post is a noble practice that I heartily support, but how is adding commentary a problem if you’re only adding a separate thing, not taking away or altering anything in the original...? This was already a practice/convention/code of social interaction on Tumblr when I got here, so I was never in the front row to witness this element taking shape. I suppose it must have made good sense at the time, but every time I see ten people reblogging the same post with no additions and a paragraph of tags appended to it, it’s like a splinter in my brain that has been digging into me for years now.

And I’m not hating on people who do that! I get that that’s The Way It’s Done Here and I am the deviant weirdo for continually adding comments directly onto things that I reblog. Tags are where individuality lives here, unless you’re producing your own original posts, which I guess other people are then supposed to reblog without commentary so that you have to go hunting after all the reblogs individually if you want to get an actual sense of what these people were all thinking when they reblogged your thing. It all just seems...so...WORK INTENSIVE, refusing to use site functions as they were intended??

Look, I absolutely know that my commentary is not the work of incisive genius that unfailingly adds value to every post I find worthy of my attention. We’re pretty much solid shitposting on this blog. Because I’m a little loaded at the moment and that gives me a handy excuse to run my fingers like an idiot (plus I put that readmore up there, so if your eyes are actually consuming these words, you have only yourself to blame for being here), let me run down relevant history of how we got here.

LJ was home for a good long while. Then shit got seriously messed up and Dreamwidth was created as a better LJ, so we migrated all our stuff over there. And journaling sites along those lines still feel like a native environment. I, in particular, am the most long-winded piece of shit we know and I am honestly incapable of talking about anything of worth in short form. It’s a sickness and I just sort of have to own it. :/ But that’s why journaling sites are a good place for me to live, because that’s where people go when they have the inclination to read meandering scrawls about the depths of other people’s lives or whatever.

We went to Twitter for a good while because all the cool people we knew from LJ were going there for some unfathomable reason. These people wrote things that were complex and fascinating to read, so all of them jumping ship to a place that limited them to 140-character chunks made no damn sense, but we loved those people and wanted to trust that they knew what the hell they were doing. And they probably did, and a couple of us were actually okay with Twitter, but I, being the long-winded shitpiece, spent a lot of time frustrated and kind of overstimulated.

Then things started going to hell more and more consistently for me personally (and us generally by extension, but that’s unnecessary detail). Bunkering down specifically to protect people that you care about from the fallout of your crazy is a fairly common thing for mentally-ill people to do, I think. So I’d shut up online until I felt stable enough to talk to people again. Those periods lasted a few days, then a week or more, then a month, then eventually I stopped talking entirely. I missed the LJ/DW format, but in the past I’d written about life events and things I was thinking about and such, so...at the time, all I really had to write about was the bad stuff. So LJ/DW was basically unusable as well.

I literally came here to be as shallow as I could possibly manage. Tumblr had a rapid, chaotic flow similar to Twitter, but could hold longer content like LJ/DW. We’ve never really used the site’s full functionality at any point, though. For at least a year, all we were following was the most lightweight, zero-calorie entertainment that we could find. (We actually came here for Flight Rising content, so there was a lot of that.) Being engaged with fandom in any consistent respect is an extremely recent thing.

And I’m not saying that fandom hasn’t got depth and complexity because it absolutely does and that’s one of the beautiful things about shared fan experiences. I kind of got into that sort of fandom by accident after getting here and rediscovering Transformers. But the unvoiced policy that I’ve always had here is to avoid the Too Real and dodge serious topics whenever possible. Thus, no gender theory, no neurodivergence or multiplicity, no nonhumanity, no religion or UPG, nothing with real substance behind it that bared real vulnerabilities. (Apparently this was a good move anyway because the nonhuman and multiplicity situation here on Tumblr is a bit of a clusterfuck? I honestly wouldn’t know, as I haven’t made a lot of effort to link up with those folks.) That’s still the policy. That might remain the policy forever until I reach some vaguely-defined threshold of sanity that makes me worthy of talking about those things in places and formats that other people can interact with.

And I’m sorry for all this talk about mental illness, but it’s simpler just to explain things clearly. I likely won’t go into any more detail about it on Tumblr. Or anywhere else, because I care about people even if I’ve never met them or talked to them at all and I still want to keep it all in the bunker to protect good people from the crazy. Sometimes, all you can do is just prevent the damage from spilling out into other people’s lives, and that’s the place that I usually operate from.

I’m still pretty drunk, so I’m allowed to ramble from too much truth serum, but all of that explanation was to get around to saying that the format of online communication that is most intuitive to me is the long, oversharing gut-spill of random people talking about things that are really meaningful to them - not in the sense of elaborate philosophy or artsy epistles to the cosmos, but just people being super real about things that are meaningful to them and going into lots of detail about them because gushing about things you love is great. And it’s possible to get that sort of discussion and gushing in Tumblr fandom, and I love it because it reminds me of better times, and the fact that I love it is WHY IT MAKES ME SO GODDAMN FRUSTRATED that Tumblr culture is basically stifling discussion and feedback and RESPONSE to things that people find interesting!!

Like, here’s how I see it. Unlike on LJ/DW, where you were limited to hyperlinking to a cool post in one of your own posts if you wanted your readers to go check it out, on Tumblr, if you find a super cool thing, you can pull it directly into your space and let other people experience it directly, exactly as you experienced it. But the thing is, I also subscribe to the My Blog My House concept. If I pull a thing into my “home,” I do it because there’s something homelike about it; it belongs in my home for some specific reason. I don’t take “ownership” of an item in the sense that I’m claiming it in place of its creator, but I’m taking ownership of it in the sense that it’s part of my Stuff now and it’ll get my fingerprints all over it and be blended into the general morass of Stuff that I recognize as my home. I don’t just pull random crap into my home for no reason at all.

And I just figure that other people are similar in the sense that they reblog things for distinct, unique reasons, not in the sense that they have some master plan for their blog content (some do, but it’s not necessary), but just that they have compelling reasons why they pick certain bits of content out of the larger river of their dashboard and put it in their own space for people to experience with them. I follow people based on the interesting things that they find interesting. I’m interested in why they’re interested in those things. They seem like interesting people to me because they’re interested in what they’re interested in.

But the WHY is a really important part of the equation for me. Did this person reblog that photo because they’ve been to that place themselves, because they like that kind of tree, because they reblog photos with that color scheme every Thursday? Did that person reblog that piece of art because they love that character, because they’re studying that art medium, because it reminded them of something funny they saw somewhere else? People attach their own context to things that they latch onto. It’s so freaking weird to me that people have to hide their interpretations or impressions in tags here on Tumblr, making them unimportant and optional in the process of sharing things they like with others. (Okay, people also share a lot of things they hate, but reasons for outrage are still part of the context that one adds to content.)

I WANT TO KNOW WHY YOU CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU’RE SHOWING ME. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT TO YOU. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT MAKES YOU THINK AND FEEL. Even if it’s a blurb about how giant robots fuck or a cute kitten video, I NEED TO KNOW THESE THINGS.

Not in excruciating detail or with insightful analysis or even a lot of text at all. Mostly, the things that people put in tags are things that, to me, are a really crucial part of the experience of being able to go into someone’s “home” and see the Stuff that they chose to put in it. Reducing oneself to a glorified signal repeater is...okay, I guess, though it turns a Tumblr blog into a kind of faceless stream of other people’s material a lot of the time. The personal touch is what makes it all interesting. And I’m just unutterably frustrated that, somewhere along the line, it was decided that personalizing an experience by sharing one’s own impressions of it became rude enough that polite society decided that it had to be hidden away in tags. I want all of it, so I do go looking for it, but omg it requires MORE EFFORT and BURNING CALORIES and BODILY MOVEMENT and WAAAAH, you know what I mean. :P

And possibly Tumblr society is right and it’s done for a good, decent purpose and I’m being pigheaded and uncool by insisting on doing things my way without bothering to try and understand the local customs. I’m not usually that much of an asshole, but I am about this, for some reason. And I admit that my craving for those personal touches could very well spring from how utterly isolated and lonely I am, so maybe normal people really don’t need all the extra info and actually do just want mostly-impersonal streams of content. And that’s fine, since I know I’m kind of a weirdo even on my best days.

I’m pretty sure that that was all that I really wanted to say. I’m probably overreacting about the whole comments-in-tags thing. Like I said, it’s kind of an irrational irritation. Also, I need to stop before I write myself sober and no longer have an excuse for all of this. If you actually read all of that, you are an awesome, generous person and I’m pretty damn certain that I love you even though I have no idea who you are.

#long post #social media #mental illness #personal history #content tagging #really i should illustrate the issue by putting a shitton of additional material down here in the tags but i'm kind of cashed out now #does anyone else experience that thing where typing directly into tumblr's post box lags like an absolute motherfucker #istg typing this out took me twice as long as it should have because i kept having to wait for tumblr to catch up to the last 20 words #not like i exactly type like a wind ninja necessarily but just that tumblr exists in a perpetual state of shitting on itself #i kind of feel bad for the poor thing #that feels faintly stockholm-syndrome-like but oh well #gratuitous tag abuse #i totally wasted an evening but at least that is all out of my system now #tbh i hate relying on alcohol for things like helping me write stuff easily but i feel more emotionally de-constipated now #seriously bless everyone who actually read all that shit #you are loved

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tweetadvise · 8 years ago

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How to Build Facebook Traffic Driving FAQ #ViralChat

Last week I was holding for the incredible team of PostPlanner. I believe we have actually discussed rather outstanding information there, so I developed these takeaways with some actionable suggestions to try!

Here's what we've discussed (click each concern for even more information!)

What suggestions can you offer to relocate fans from Facebook to an internet site or blog?

How can Facebook be utilized to drive website traffic and eventually develop an email list?

What role does aesthetic material play in relocating web traffic from Facebook to a web site or blog?

Traffic is terrific, however just how can you boost conversions from Facebook leads?

What are the best means hashtags can be utilized to boost website traffic from Facebook?

How does EdgeRank influence your capacity to drive traffic from Facebook?

You are a master at driving web traffic from Facebook. What are your top secrets?

What devices can Web page managers use to boost Facebook interaction as well as traffic?

Influencers play a huge role in web traffic driving initiatives. Exactly how do you create those relationships?

Other compared to money, what else do we have to invest to grow our website traffic with Facebook?

1. What tips can you supply to move followers from Facebook to a website or blog?

(1) Post content regularly:

Create regular columns (e.g. once a week marketing idea) linking to where they could discover more!

Post web links with headlines that intrigue and gets people click!

( 2) Arrange and also buffer updates

I've noted some of the finest organizing social media devices along with more functional social media sites tips in this article.

(3) Diversify:

Today's pattern is to recommend to post images as well as post picture updates just. I advise playing with both: If you discuss as URL, the picture thumbnail is clickable

VS:

( 3) Brand name pages are restricted in visibility

I frequently share on web page initially and afterwards re-share to my individual account (to grow both)

( 4) Usage Facebook page calls-to-action!

2. Exactly how can Facebook be utilized to drive website traffic as well as eventually construct an e-mail list?

( 1) Usage pertinent calls-to-action

Play with various ones to discover a far better transforming one!) They include analytics too.

I am not sure if people ever before click a web link in 'Regarding' area (I never ever do) however this does get clicks that convert!

Make sure that call-to-action matters (e.g. do not utilize 'Contact us' call-to-action if you really want them to subscribe)

( 2) Use 'Increase' function to advertise your material routinely

You do not need massive budget plans required: Even just $5 per article will raise your content visibility.

No secret that Facebook is prioritizing your good friend's personal material in information feed over web pages, so you need to pay for exposure!

( 3) Interact (like+ reply) with every comment

This boosts your total exposure (and also therefore website traffic) . Gradually gain relationships with your fans using fast contests, deals, etc to boost its organic reach

3. What function does aesthetic material play in relocating web traffic from Facebook to a website or blog?

Huge! Images naturally draw in even more attention and activities (Our eyes are naturally drawn to visuals!)

Secondly, Facebook is known to prioritize material you upload (pictures, video clips) to linked material (that drives people off Facebook).

That stated, visuals have the tendency to outperform non-visual material (however as I stated, branch out!)

Visual content enhances exposure and develops your organic reach and hence boosts your overall Facebook results.

4. Traffic is terrific, however how could you boost conversions from Facebook leads?

( 1) Maximize your landing web page to those who originate from Facebook

Think about your Facebook site visitors' intent: e.g. If they come for an enjoyable viral read, it's not clever to attempt to instantly offer anything to them! That group might be become e-mail leads for 'much more enjoyable material such as this'

( 2) You can promote your phone call to activity making use of advertisements too!

( 3) You can utilize calls-to-action when posting a video clip to a page

I see excellent outcomes with uploading video clips that come with a contact us to activity! Users react well to that!

5. What are the very best methods hashtags can be used to raise website traffic from Facebook?

I don't use Facebook hashtags as typically as I need. Unlike Twitter, I do not utilize common hashtags on Facebook like #healthcare

Instead, I utilize specific and trending hashtags (when it makes good sense) like event hashtags, local hashtags that trends

Examples: Regional businesses could improve Facebook page exposure by warning fans of bad climate conditions with regional hashtag

Facebook hashtags could make good sense for (famous personality), regional communities, events, think objects, not concepts

I wrote on hashtag research study at @PostPlanner blog (not all that functions for FB though).

I created a post on different means to use hashtags on social network sites here.

6. Exactly how does EdgeRank influence your capacity to drive web traffic from Facebook?

EdgeRank could be much more challenging that I think of however to me it works such as this: The more you interact, the more of your updates individuals you interact with will normally see.

This functions for both the individual profile and the page (pages are tougher though)

This means you should frequently exist to interact (like, remark) with other individuals's content.

They state dwell time (the length of time individuals look at the upgrade prior to scrolling even without connecting) additionally matters for EdgeRank This suggests your Facebook updates should catch an eye: Make certain they require a second look.

EdgeRank matters greater than timing on Facebook (unlike Twitter)

7. You are a master at driving web traffic from Facebook. Just what are your leading secrets?

Not sure if there's anything secret concerning that but:

( 1) Increase articles (specifically with calls-to-action in them)

Often I'll improve a post which I anticipate to do well naturally (meme or video): To enhance my 'EdgeRank'.

(2) Post offers with links:

They have the tendency to receive some natural interactions and also clicks!

Facebook offers often tend to have an ideal intent: This website traffic converts!

( 3) Play with 'trigger' words:

I saw my FB friend add "Anniversary!' word to her upgrade to see a lot more engagements.

You do not want to exaggerate with those but why not discuss your blog site wedding anniversary with a link?

(4) Use Viral Content Buzz to get individuals outside of my circles share my material on Facebook.

Viral Content Buzz supports both individual as well as bus web page sharing and scheduling!

( 5) Use Facebook 'Clicks to website' ads and also play with numerous phrasing as well as target market until you find yours

8. What tools can Page managers utilize to boost Facebook interaction and traffic?

Use PostPlanner to create a regular, yet not frustrating facebook publishing calendar

I also make use of MavSocial to set up aesthetic updates for a month a head (to always have something neat taking place)

I usage Cyfe to keep an eye on all my page statistics on one web page (to detect where we are lacking)

I use BuzzSumo to examine which material works out on Facebook in my particular niche (search by keyword/site and also filter by Facebook shares)

As I claimed, I use VCBuzz to enhance my FB reach past my links for free

9. Influencers play a significant duty in web traffic driving initiatives. How do you develop those relationships?

I tag! Right here are a few Facebook-tagging policies that function as well as don't irritate influencers!

( 1) Never ever label any person unless that makes feeling:

e. g. I mark people/ devices I discussed in my article

( 2) You will not be able to label individual accounts from business web pages (in many cases), so below's just what I do: I share on company page first, and also after that re-share as an individual account tagging every person pointed out in the connected article

( 3) I tag business pages in business page upgrade (easier than tagging individuals)

Those business web page managers will certainly be notified and will certainly pertain to your web page to like as well as interact!

10. Aside from cash, just what else do we should invest to expand our website traffic with Facebook?

Time and also creativity! Generate initial graphics as well as beneficial content!

You could check out great deals of insight on Facebook advertising yet eventually it boils down to lots of playing and also experimenting

The much more you do, the even more engagement and web traffic you build, so you have to spend great deals of time

#affiliate marketing #business #business pages #digital marketing #internet marketing #internet marketing company #marketing #marketing strategy #media marketing #online marketing #social media #social media management #social media marketing strategy #social media sites #social network #social network sites

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bestcanvasprintsaustralia · 6 years ago

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20 Unmissable Social Media Tips for Artists

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Posted on January 21, 2019 by

gary.k

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If you’re a new artist, new to Social Media or just trying to increase your business we’ve put together 20 useful tips to help you get started. We’ll help you navigate through the ways to increase your audience and some tips on what not to do as well! Check out our blog here.

1 Consistency is Key

Be consistent across your social media platforms. Present a consistent, professional face to your audience. Have separate personal and professional accounts and a consistent artist statement and ‘voice’ across all of them. By all means share the cat memes and political jokes on your personal pages but keep them off your professional pages, unless your professional work is Cat memes or Political cartoons, in which case go ahead and share!

2 Branding, Branding, Branding

This relates to using the same name across your Social Media accounts, similar wording, same logo or avatar. It also goes back to being consistent. Establish the name and use it everywhere, so people can find and recognize you and your work. Luckily there are an increasing number of businesses been set up to help artists with their marketing and branding such as Fine Art Tips by Lori McNee’s site and ArtBizSucess

3 Post Frequently

Keep on posting! Post daily for maximum effect. Post more than once a day to build your presence. Keep posting. There are tools out there that allow you to schedule posts. Use them to their full effect, and schedule posts at various time of the day and night. Your audience may be in another country so post in their evenings, their mornings as well as in your own time zone.

4 Share and Share Alike

Social Media is a form of networking to connect with other artists, share ideas and inspirations, and share support for each other. However, also be aware that quantity of followers is not necessarily the goal. Follow people whose work you truly admire, not just like for like. Follow some well-known artists, and see what they post about, the frequency of their posts and the message they send. This site has some nice info and articles about best practise for social media for artists.

5 #Hashtag #Highlights

Hashtags should be used to draw attention to the key themes or points of your post. So for art related tagging you can use the theme of the work, the colour scheme, the title of the work, your name if it is different to the name of your Social Media account; try not to use the same tags all the time, some platforms will penalize you for that.

6 Hashtag Tools

There are tools for finding trending hashtags and this can be very helpful to get your posts in front of a new audience. However, it’s only really effective if your posts align with the theme of the hashtag. Don’t go posting a bunch of unrelated ‘trendy’ tags to draw in people, it will look spammy and work against you.

7 Be Vocal and Unique

Have your own style and voice. This will develop over time with most people but it’s something to be aware of from the start. You want people to see a post and instantly recognize it as your voice, your work from the moment they see it come up on their feed, even if they don’t notice who posted it.

8 I tube, YouTube

If your work is highly visual consider a YouTube channel. You can use it to showcase skills, demonstrate techniques or simply show time lapse of your work being created. People love to see video ‘behind the scenes’ and with a half decent cell phone and good lighting you’d be surprised how easy this is to do. If you don’t want to talk to the audience use copyright free background music with some simple editing software to package your video.

9 You Teach

Some artists take their YouTube channel and branch out into teaching others how to paint, draw, and create. This builds their brand and many people have become quite successful in their fields from starting on YouTube.

10 Free Tools make good sense

Make good use of free tools online to assist with managing Social Media posting and content packaging. Hootsuite is one that offers a basic free account for 3 Social channels. There are several others out there also, Buffer, TweetDeck for Twitter users, and more!

11 Become a Blogger

A blog is an opportunity to share more than your art with others. Many people use it to share aspects of their day, things that inspire them; all the unique things that make YOU stand out. This helps build loyalty with your followers. Again, use discretion on posting personal news and views that may offend your audience.

12 Connect with your community

Local knowledge and local support cannot be underestimated. Sure, your friends and family are there for you, but you need to build new connections also. Reach out to your community pages on Facebook; check their rules on promoting your own pages, blogs or sale sites.

13 Give it your best shot!

It really is important when sharing pictures of your completed work to have the highest quality images online. Invest in a good camera if you can. It doesn’t even have to be a new camera but one that can take high-resolution pictures is best. If you are a painter it’s good to take pictures of your work outdoors under natural light. That gives the best colour resolution.

14 Make a Statement

On your Social Media sites, there will be an About Me section. This is where you should put an Artist’s Statement, introducing yourself, your motivations for making and creating, your recurring themes, current works and enough about yourself to pique the interest of your audience. Keep it up to date.

15 Self Promotion is good for the soul

Get out there on Social Media. Promote your art, your upcoming showings, and your next big thing. Are you changing direction in your themes? Moving from one medium to another? Tell your audience; generate excitement in your brand. We enjoyed this article on 10 ways to UNSUCCESSFULLY market yourself as an artist

16 Get out of your rut!

Sometimes it’s too easy to get into a pattern of formulaic posts. Shake things up from time to time. Post at different times of the day. Increase the frequency of your posts for a week to generate more engagement with your followers. Add video to your posts. Try new styles. Challenge yourself and bring your followers along with the journey!

17 Your product is your focus

Sure, it’s easy to be distracted when creating a new social media channel, making backgrounds, choosing fonts on blogs, creating logos and adding buttons! But is that what you are actually promoting? Your focus is your product. Don’t distract your audience with a bunch of unnecessary bells and whistles; you want them to look at your art.

18 Analyse This

Use tools available on the web to analyse your Social Media reach. If you are using a Social Media scheduling program they include reporting functions so you can check engagement, likes, comments and determine things like best time of day to post, who is reading, who is commenting. There is also Google analytics that can be added to many sites to see where people are visiting from, what pages they look at and how long they visit your site. It will help you immensely to see what is working and what is not attracting and keeping people interested.

19 Connect the dots

Make connections. Grow your network in real life and bring them online to your pages. Ask friends to share and invite like-minded people to your Social Media presence. Put your art out there in appropriate locations to sell and to promote your brand. Have it framed and have your Instagram, Facebook or YouTube channel on the matting in the frame, on a card attached to the frame, or some visible place. Run contests for followers who bring new fans to your sites. Keep sharing and showing your work online and in the real world too.

20 Make Art

No matter how many posts you make across every Social Media channel there is, you still need to take time out to actually create Art. Use a planner, make a schedule, or use phone reminders to set limits on your Social Media time so you don’t get sucked into the abyss of time-wasting online. Get on, do what you need to do and then get offline and go make something!

We hope you’ve found some of these tips helpful. The key to all of this is to get yourself out there and get involved, and most of all have fun doing it!

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siliconwebx · 6 years ago

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Building an Online Community from the Ground Up

Unless you’re a natural social butterfly, building your own online community may sound a little daunting. However, if you plan correctly, you can set up a little section of the internet that you and yours can call home for years to come. In this post we’ll walk you though a few stages you’ll need to navigate in order to see your idea of a community become a reality.

Planning Stages

You cannot just jump head-first into building a community. Sometimes they just kind of organically emerge, but if you’re looking to start a purposeful group, you need a plan. Otherwise, things can get out of hand quickly. Not necessarily in a bad way — you might become the place to be and grow exponentially faster than you expected to. Whatever the case, approaching building your community purposefully is your best bet for success.

1. Why Do You Want to Build a Community?

To start off with, you need to know specifically why you’re building this community. It is very easy to get in over your head and let a project go sideways without a clear vision of why you’re doing it and where it’s going. So think on it, and ask yourself the hard question: how will this community benefit its members?

That’s a hard question to answer. Especially because there are a lot of communities out there already. The internet is a big place. Just look at Reddit with the massive amount of users and categories and subreddits that people participate in. So if you’re going to build a community from the ground up, what will it bring to the table?

As an example, when I started my first podcast, I talked with my partner a lot about this. What even made us start talking about the podcast to begin with was wanting a place to talk with people. We missed the old days of blogging where conversations happened in the comments sections instead of on social media. It didn’t feel as personal or as social to us.

We wanted to talk to people and make friends. It was as simple as that. We wanted to produce content that would bring people together and have a conversation.

So that was our why.

Determine Your ROI:

Just a quick note about running a community. Sometimes you might not make a profit on it. You may be spending money or time on building this up. It can be a lot of work, so you should ask yourself what return you want out of this. This return should be entirely separate from the community goals above.

You may want an increase in emails to blast mail in return for providing a space for folks to congregate. You may be looking to create a route for customer support and brand loyalty to increase. Your company might even be looking to use it as a recruitment tool, finding new talent from people passionate about your brand or project.

Basically, you want to make sure that you aren’t expending resources without getting anything in return. If taken seriously and done right, a community can be a lot of work, so you want to make sure that even if your motives are altruistic and for the good of your audience and users, there is still a return in some way for you.

2. Find a Concept (or Stay on Brand)

Once you know why you’re going to build your community, the next step is making sure you appeal to the right people. As one of my old bosses used to tell me, “you gotta find your schtick.” Basically, what I’m saying is that you need a brand identity. I really liked how this article from Brandisty put it: “Let me be clear: a brand is the relationship between an organization and an audience.”

With that in mind, I am not saying you need a logo or a 4-color palette for your media kit. I’m saying that you need to know what your community is going to represent to its members. At Elegant Themes, for instance, we work to represent style and empowerment for our users. We want people to see or hear the words Divi or Elegant Themes and think to themselves “Oh yeah, their stuff lets me do my job so much easier than before” or “Man, the photos in that latest layout pack are perfect for [Insert Big Client’s Name]’s site.”

Sure, we have beautiful logos and pretty colors, but those are secondary to what is really important: making your life better through excellent design.

Now, if you have a brand already (and you probably do), think about who your users are and what you want to be to them. What purpose will this community serve to them? For you, it will (hopefully) lead to increased revenue, higher brand awareness and reach, and improvements in your products or service. But what good does it do your users to be members?

As an example of that, with my podcast, my partner and I wanted the relationship between our listeners and our show to be that of a matchmaker. We wanted to facilitate people meeting new friends. So if they listened to our podcast, they would have ample opportunity to talk with like-minded people through our community that we worked on building. Same for Elegant Themes — we have a very active comments section here on the blog, a Meetup network of Divi Nation groups, and so on. We strive to make sure that you participating means you get some value that doesn’t come directly from the software itself.

That’s our brand. Now find yours.

3. Craft a Mission Statement

Yes, those dreaded words. Mission Statement. The only two words that can make a committee meeting even more dreadful. But you need one. It doesn’t have to be anything complex (it’s better if it’s not), but you need to get that concept behind your brand identity into writing. That’s all. Mission statements serve the purpose of giving you a cornerstone to look back on and make sure that you’re on track. And if not, you can easily course correct.

4. Where Will Your Community Gather?

Today, there are a ton of options to choose from, and depending on your type of brand or project, some may work better than others. There are really two things you have to keep in mind about this:

Do you want a completely free forum, or do you want to own and control your own platform?

Where does your audience already hang out?

The pros of going for a free forum is that most of the leg-work is done for you. Choosing an option like a Facebook Group is great because so many people already use it (so you show up where they already are), and you can get started in just a few clicks. It takes mere minutes to get Groups up and running on Facebook.

The cons of using an externally hosted platform is that you don’t have any control over it. Not really. You and your community are subject to their ToS and business model and lifespan and so on. However,

Controlling your own platform gives you freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want. But it comes at the cost of being yet another account your users have to sign up for. With forums and various membership site plugins for WordPress, you can absolutely go this route. But if you make the process too much of a chore, your community may never get off the ground.

Some Platform Options:

I want to list some of the more popular platforms to grow an online community, and in many cases, creators and brands choose multiples to reach different segments of their audience. For example, some people may spend the majority of their time online with Discord open in the background, but never log into Facebook. Or some people might be hardcore Redditors and Twitter influencers, but avoid group chat platforms altogether.

Discord – A group chat that is aimed at gamers, but robust enough to work for a variety of community types. Very handy if your user base is already using it, as your server could just be added to their list.

Slack – A group chat that many companies use for work, so people very likely already have this one installed. Setting up your own Slack server is free, and communities here thrive during the day since people can participate while looking like they’re hard at work.

Reddit – The largest community on the internet. Basically one giant forum, anyone can set up a subreddit (subforum), which anyone can subscribe to and participate in.

Facebook Groups – You’re probably already a member of a few Facebook groups. These groups can easily go viral, have lots of admin options, and take advantage of a place your people are already likely to be.

Twitter hashtags – Twitter hashtags can also be a community. Often taking the form of a chat (such as #bibchat or #codenewbies), these tend to be regular, moderated discussions that eventually grow into a tag folks use all the time to keep everyone connected.

YouTube comments – Despite their reputation, if you foster a healthy discussion in the comments of your videos, you can build a very active and thriving community there. People’s channels will follow and interact with one another, share playlists, and just generally grow together.

Live streams – If you regularly live stream, you will get a cadre of viewers who tune in. Those people then fill up the chats as you go, talking with you and each other, and then those comments continue after the stream is over. This is generally not the primary location for your community, but it’s a fantastic way to get people to interact and hang out together.

Forums and Message Boards – While on the decline in popularity, forums and message boards are the old standby for internet communities. Totally asynchronous messaging threads are incredibly useful for long, detailed discussions. However, because they are generally entirely separate from other accounts and platforms, people have to make an effort to check the boards to see new updates. If you decide to go this route, there are plenty of WordPress plugins available including bbPress.

Social Media Pages and Profiles – Simply having a Facebook page or a Twitter profile that interacts with other users in and of itself. Look at the Wendy’s Twitter account. Or Zappos. They keep their social media managers interacting with customers constantly, and their responses stay on brand. So people get involved. Again, this won’t be the primary platform, but it can be very important.

5. Lay Down The Law

You have to write down whatever rules and guidelines you want your members to follow. Communities go downhill fast if you have no rules to govern them. Even if they’re as simple as “no self-promotion, hate speech, or personal attacks will be tolerated.”

As the community manager, it’s your job to determine the bounds within which the members stay. They can be as rigid or as lenient as you want, but the important thing is that they exist and are posted for people to see. Well, and that they’re enforced, but we’ll get to that next.

Action Stages

A lot of the planning for a community is academic. You’re thinking and envisioning and trying to make sure all your ducks are in a row. After that, you get to put you feet to the pavement (or maybe fingers to the keyboard) and start dealing with people.

1. Start It Up

Okay, so take steps 1-5 under the planning stages and do them. It’s time to implement your plan. It’s time to start that Facebook Group or launch that Discord server. Take everything that you’ve been thinking about and make it real. It doesn’t matter that your users aren’t aware of it yet. That’s okay. You want to lay claim to your spot.

If you have been planning it for a while, you might have even told them that you were working on this. So long before you start inviting people, plant your flag and get it to waving. The important thing is that no one gets an Under Construction page or a broken URL. Once you start pointing people at where you want them to be, you want them to stay there. So get the forums up and running. Set the permissions and channels in Discord. Upload your emoji to Slack.

Take your idea and make it real.

2. Soft Launch

A soft launch will be your best bet for introducing people to your community. And by soft launch, I mean, not promoting it to the world at large. Just let people organically trickle in. Maybe you invite a handful of people or casually drop a note about it in your podcast or at the end of an email. Maybe even a Join our Community button on your website. But not putting effort into telling people about it.

Why?

Because of bugs and snags and all the thousands of things that could go wrong. You want to be able to work out the kinks before bringing in a boatload of people. If the first impression that people get of your community is that it’s shoddy, you probably won’t get a second one.

Especially if there’s any kind of premium price tag attached. If that’s the case, give a few free memberships or trials to some people to try out and get things rolling. They’ll feel special, it’ll be a soft launch, and you’ll hopefully get some free advertisement for when you do launch officially.

3. Recruit Staff and Assign Roles

Now this is a kind of iffy stage, to be honest. Some people don’t need this step at this point. Everyone will eventually, though. You can handle going solo, trying to build an online community all on your own (I’m thinking of Saron from CodeNewbie, who did it all by her lonesome at first). Some of you already have a staff or group of volunteers. Heck, some of you already have an audience who are clamoring to be more involved with you.

But if you don’t, it’s time to grease some palms. Figuratively, and maybe even literally.

You won’t need much. Just a few people to make sure things run smoothly. You will want people to moderate discussion, generally, and make sure the rules you set up are followed. Even if you start out doing it all by your lonesome, there will be people stepping up to enforce them for you. Even without you asking. These are perfect recruits. Additionally, you can see the people who engage the most and care about the community’s growth and health and ask them if they want to be involved in a greater capacity.

In the end, it’s the caring about the community’s growth and health that matters.

4. Really Launch and Promote Your Tail Off

This is the big moment. Once most of the outstanding bugs are taken care of, you are ready to get this show on the road. You can shout it from the rooftops and let the entire world know that your doors are open and welcoming to anyone who wants to be a part of something special.

And this is where you have to do most of the work. Because you need to get people interested and invested and actually participating in your community. All of your marketing energy will likely be spent going toward your community for a while, and that’s okay. It’ll pay off. (Remember earlier when we talked about your ROI?)

It depends entirely on your project and brand on what channels you promote through, but in general, you want to go overboard. Just to the point where you don’t annoy people.

Running Facebook ads or AdWords campaigns is a popular way to recruit. If you are a community of artists, Instagram ads would be perfect. Send out an email to all your lists. Then a few days later, segment it to those who didn’t open it. Schedule a lot of Tweets and Facebook posts using Hootsuite or Buffer. CoSchedule is another good option.

For the initial launch period, you may want to do a combination of live streams and interact with your audience or customers that way. Promote those personally. Even do giveaways if it’s a premium community. And use Facebook events, even if you’re not on Facebook. It’s hard to believe how much Virtual Launch Parties can help a project’s reach. Or really any virtual event, for that matter.

Maintenance Stage

So you’ve launched. You’re up and running. You have people visiting your community every day, and everything is going even better than you expected. So what now? Well, you maintain it. You keep on doing what works, and maybe throwing some new ideas in the mix to keep things fresh for your customers and audience.

Basically, to maintain a community, you go through most of the steps you did to launch it, just to a lesser degree.

Periodically look at the mission statement and purpose of your community to evaluate whether you are on track with your goals.

Make sure your ROI is on track. Check if you’re putting in enough effort or too much into keeping things going.

Always monitor the users and keep an eye on MVPs. You can never have too many people in your corner. Harvest the talent there for everyone’s gains.

You should also monitor your monitors. Make sure the rules you laid out are still being followed and that the community is still what you meant for it to be.

Continue marketing. You don’t want to go all-out like you did to launch it. To build an online community requires people hearing about it. Maintaining one is about retention and interactivity. But you will still need to keep it in your marketing rotation so it doesn’t become stagnant or insular.

That’s All There Is To It.

And isn’t that enough? If you are going to build an online community, it takes time, effort, and a lot of planning. But when it’s done right, there is really no better element you can add to your brand or company. Positive interaction with your target audience is more valuable than pretty much anything else these days, and there’s not really anything more positive than inviting them to your own space that you made especially for them.

What have your experiences been with building an online community? Let’s talk about it in the comments!

Article featured image by O.darka / shutterstock.com

The post Building an Online Community from the Ground Up appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog.

from Elegant Themes Blog https://ift.tt/2BDVdAp via SiliconWebDesign

#Silicon Web Design #Silicon Web Site #Elegant Themes Blog

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jessicakmatt · 7 years ago

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5 Social Media Metrics That Musicians Think About All Wrong

5 Social Media Metrics That Musicians Think About All Wrong: via LANDR Blog

Metrics for musicians.

It’s a phrase that’s becoming more and more important these days. And for good reason too. In a recent poll, NME ranked social media (26%) just behind playing live (51%) as the most important channel for musicians looking to get their music heard.

Today you have all sorts of numbers flying at you: likes, shares, listens, plays, streams, spins, royalties and mentions. It can all seem pretty hollow when you’re trying to stay inspired and dedicated to producing your best work.

This week we added the new LANDR Share to Social feature that lets you share your music directly to your social channels from your LANDR library and connect with your fans in many ways.

We added it because sharing your music to your fans is just as important as the creative process that led you to being finished in the first place. So it should all be part of the same workflow—creation to promotion in one simple step.

But it got me thinking, “After I share my music, what now? What metrics actually matter? And who’s really listening?”

To make sure you don’t get blinded by all the noise of social media—and the numbers that come with it, I decided to unpack the 5 most important metrics and find out what they really mean for independent music (hint: it’s not the numbers, it’s what’s behind them that counts).

Understand your metrics, track your following and make the connections that really matter for building a healthy and happy fanbase.

1. Likes

So your music is finally done! You take the plunge and share it to socials. Great, people start liking your track on social media! The thumb is getting sore from thumbing so much!

Likes are great. They’re a perfect starting point for tracking your success…

But the question you need to be asking is WHO liked your track and why?

Use your likes to get to know your audience, start a discussion in the comments about your process, discuss parts you weren’t feeling great about and parts that you were really happy with, link to your influences and inspirations and ask for feedback!

It all helps to build a story around your track and add value to the plays that you’re getting.

Nothing is better than a real honest exchange, digital, or real life. Likes should be a starting point for building a relationship with your fans, not the endgame that you obsess about too much.

Hot Tip: When you’re sharing your releases to social, ask a question in your post. It’s a great way to get your fans involved and encourage discussion around your tracks. It also shows that you care about your following’s opinion.

Explore who’s listening by checking your likes. You might even be surprised at who’s supporting your music. Are they also musicians? Why not listen to their track in exchange and give a like back. Or better yet, drop them a DM and connect. That way you build a relationship of mutual support, and you encourage people to continue following and liking you.

Nothing is better than a real honest exchange, digital, or real life. Likes should be a starting point for building a relationship with your fans, not the endgame that you obsess about too much. Build your likes, but use them once you have them for developing your fanbase.

2. Shares

Sharing is caring. The same goes for your music. If people share it, it means they’re doing more than scrolling through their feed and liking something distractedly or out of obligation.

When something comes from the heart, people see it and want to share it further. When you’re crafting your social post, tell some of your story. Why are you happy to share your release? Was it the product of months of hard work, with the precious help of many collaborators? Include some of that in your post.

Hot Tip: When you make a social post, tag everyone that is credited on your album—the vocalists, each band member, the mixing engineer, producer, the designer of the album art and anyone else involved. It’s a nice way to say thank you, and increase the chances of having them share your release too.

3. Streams

So you just distributed your track. You’re nervously checking your stats every hour in hope that your stream counts go up.

Trust me, I’ve been there too. Whatever you do, don’t let it become an obsession! Stressing about stream stats can distract you from understanding the bigger picture.

Of course, if a song is made and you don’t let people know, you’ll miss out on most of your streams. Any release needs a promotional campaign on social media. Post about it on Facebook and Twitter. Make a fun Instagram story about it.

Stats aren’t the end game—they’re a starting point for discovering your audience. Use them to guide your decisions and connect better.

But think about what those streams tell you about the listeners behind them. Check in a day, a week, a month or even a year to get the full picture of your releases streams. Ask yourself: where do my streams come from, what countries and cities? How can I reach out to those areas? Here are some ideas:

Reach out to a blog from a region where your music is getting streamed to feature your music

Reach out to a local radio station

Write to fellow musicians you admire in those areas

Book an out of town show

Even though music has no boundaries these days, the humans who listen to it live in specific places. Those are the places where you’re gonna want to focus your resources. Stats aren’t the end game—they’re a starting point for discovering your audience. Use them to guide your decisions and connect better.

4. Subscriptions

Aside from your social media, there’s another fantastic tool to get in touch with your fans: a mailing list. Mailing lists let you turn one-time listeners into long time fans.

They’ve been around forever. Many bands used to post a form at their merch table at shows to give fans the option to stay in touch. Newsletters have since gone digital, but the benefit is still there for staying connected.

Services like Mailchimp or Bandzoogle let you capture and manage your contacts and send out quick and simple newsletters direct to your fans.

Your mailing list is an effective communication tool, especially at a time when social media feeds are overcrowded. Your newsletter is a space that’s all your own.

A casual fan on social media becomes a longterm supporter when you give them the option of signing up to your mailing list.

Subscriptions are a sign of trust. If someone gives you their email, they trust you to use it well. It means they’re paying attention and they want to stay updated about your music. So subscribers is one of the most important metrics to target. Every subscriber is not just a listener, but a true fan who is interested enough in your music to let you into their everyday lives—pretty powerful when you think about it…

It’s your chance to send personalized, honest, interesting content to a receptive audience—like a photo essay from your last tour, your upcoming shows, your radio appearances, your releases, press about you, your merch (also a great place to offer discounts), etc.

Add your newsletter signup link when you share newly released music or in your social media bios.

A casual fan on social media becomes a longterm supporter when you give them the option of signing up to your mailing list. So your subscriptions stats going up are a great sign that you’re doing it right.

5. Your Inbox

The most important connection you can make with your fans is meaningful one-on-one interactions. So messages in your inbox is another important metric. Treat each on like a connections that could open doors to opportunity.

Think about it: a direct message means that a fan, blogger, or booker:

Likes your project enough to take the time out of their busy schedule to message you directly.

Views you and your music as approachable and honest.

Wants to dig deeper into your music and learn more about something that’s intrigued them.

It’s a very human response when so many things in music today can seem cold and lifeless.

Make yourself available to your fans and community by posting your artist email on your social profiles or when sharing a new release to your social media pages (fan mail starts with fans knowing where to send it!).

The most important connection you can make with your fans is meaningful one-on-one interactions.

Respond as quickly as you can and make every encounter as wholesome as possible. One genuine interaction with someone that’s interested in your music can make heaps of difference when most music industry emails or direct messages are forgotten. It’s the little things that add up over time.

Having your contact info out in the open shows that you are approachable and makes people more inclined to get in touch with you. Which means potential invites to make a guest mix, appear on a radio show, or even release on a label. You’ll never know unless you’re available.

If people write to you make a point of personally responding to each message. Set a good precedent by being a nice person (what a concept!). Make it what makes YOU stand out.

The Bigger Picture

Every social metric counts towards your big picture. Don’t obsess over specifics like boosting your plays or your likes.

Look at all your social sharing and platforms as part of a bigger goal: Building a following of dedicated and engaged fans that feel a personal connection with you and your music.

Behind every stream, like or play there’s a human being. Use your social sharing tools and platforms to do everything you can to be a human back.

The post 5 Social Media Metrics That Musicians Think About All Wrong appeared first on LANDR Blog.

from LANDR Blog https://blog.landr.com/music-metrics/ via https://www.youtube.com/user/corporatethief/playlists from Steve Hart https://stevehartcom.tumblr.com/post/166791411744

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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In defense of Snapchat, a manifesto

Image: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

YeahI’m a business and tech reporter, who reports on social media networks. And in order to do the job correctly, it’s on me to maintain a degree of objective remove. That said: I’m not a reporting robot without ideas, preferences, or a life beyond my gig. And while part of that job also involves spending time on social networks, like all of you, (A) I still do it for fun, and (B) If you looked at my phone, it’d be pretty obvious what my favorite social networks are, and how I spend my time using them.

SEE ALSO: Here’s why all the sudden the banks love Snapchat but still hate Twitter

Here’s a good snapshot:

Which brings us to Facebook, down there, towards the bottom of my usage. They just unleashed their latest attempt to squash Snapchat on Tuesday with Facebook Storiesthe experience of Snapchat Stories, now available on your Facebook News Feed, something nearly 2 billion people could have access to, if you let them. There’s more about that here.

It’s nothing new. Snapchat’s faced down a full-on assault for your attention from Facebook-owned properties, in the forms of Instagram Stories, Messenger Day and WhatsApp Stories, each trying to replicate the very things that make Snapchat, well, Snapchat, but under a different, Facebook-owned app.

Instagram Stories is, thus far, the big winner, with everyone from the network’s most influential creators to its most typical users embracing the feature. Instagram Stories went from 0 to 150 million monthly active users in six months. My colleague, Mashable deputy tech editor Damon Beres, is one of those culprits, and openly admits it (“My #thirst has driven me to abandon Snapchat for Instagram Stories“).

Damon found that “Instagram’s rate of coolness per capita is higher than Snapchat’s. There’s just a bigger audience of interesting people to communicate with on Instagram.”

‘Kay, fine. Fair. But let’s be totally clear: Damon’s saying that he’s Team Instagram because his account is getting what he feels are more highly-valued views.

Thing is, I’m Team Snapchat for the exact same reason.

“Snapchat,” continued Damon, “will likely remain my favorite app for sending incredibly weird things to a handful of close friendsits selection of stickers, face-transforming filters, geolocation tags and so forth.”

And that’s exactly my point, and why Snapchat’s the more valuable of the two appsbecause the mouthbreathing annony-succubi followers of Instagram (especially Damon’s, lol) might be more proliferate, and might be more influential, but I still don’t really know nor care who the fuck any of ’em are.

Snapchat’s where my friends areyes, my real friends. On Facebook and Instagram, I’ll add you as a friend, and you can feel free to stalk my high school photos. I don’t really care. But when it comes to my life, in real-time, in the momentwhat I do every day before work, or after work? That’s on Snapchat.

But when it comes to my life, in real-time, in the moment, when it comes to what I do every day before work, or after work? That’s on Snapchat.

And I’m not inviting you in, unless you gain my trust. It’s kind of like building sources as a journalist: I’m giving you access to my personal life. And yeah, you could take a screenshot of my Snapchat, and share it to the world. And while I’ll know that you did it, it’d be too late to take it back. So as far as my Snapchat’s concerned, you need to be vetted before I let you in.

That’s not to say I’m doing anything too racy and posting it to my Snapchat Story. In fact, that’s another reason why I love the app. For the people that do enjoy seeing it, who I very much trust with my private life, I can send them personal messages. They disappear. And that’s great. They don’t have it saved on their phone because they honestly don’t need it there.

And neither do I.

Shocker: I sext. I’ve sent my fair share of nudes to boyfriends and to others. I’m not ashamed. And if you’re wondering why I don’t just text them, it’s because Snapchat just makes it way more comfortable for us all. Like I said: I don’t need these on my phone, and neither do they. And if they doit happensthey can screenshot. All the more flattery, to be honest.

To be sure, I was once a Snapchat hater, too. One of my best friends tried to convince me to download it in 2012, while I was a sophomore in college. I told her I was too busy with school. Still, I downloaded the app four months later, and I don’t regret it.

To be sure, I was a Snapchat hater too once upon a time.

And while I report on Snapchatas well as other tech companiesfor a living, it’s not reporting on Snapchat that makes me love Snapchat.

What I love about Snapchat is the joy it provides me. I go to Facebook if I want to stalk my ex or a high school classmate. It not funthere’s no real joy in itbut it’s cursory, I do it anyway. I go to Snapchat when I want to genuinely see what my friends are doing. Sure, it creates FOMO; but it’s also an opportunity for me to easily reach out or reply with a funny face or sticker or Bitmoji. It’s a different language, for me and my friends. Not the randos in my life.

And I love Snapchat for the news and the stories it shares. Beyond watching whatever my Snapchat friends are doing, the app (usually) presents me with daily, well-packaged content from media brands, like, say, Mashable’s (Disclosure: Mashable is a Snapchat Discover partner) are enjoyable reads, or tap-throughs.

On Facebook, most of the time, news articles come with obnoxious commentary from friends. My brother-in-law leaves an angry reaction on everything I post (okay, I know, it’s a joke). But: It’s just not fun. If I want to read news through a filtered bubble, I’ll go to my Twitter.

Snapchat’s breaking news coverage is also an incredible product in and of itself. Props to Peter Hamby, Snap’s head of news, for making sure they curate stories with smart news judgment (*cough* Facebook Trending Topics disaster *cough*). It’s pretty inarguable: Snapchat’s got some of the best news coverage on social media.

And the lenses. I know Facebook copied your lenses, Snapchat. But damn, your puppy filter will always bring me joyno matter if Facebook completely mimics it. I’ll never forget the many times I’ve played around with filters with my exes, my best friends, and my mom.

Lenses are fairly new on Snapchat, as in the last two years, but they embody the Snapchat aestheticone they’ve been developing for the last five years.

I’m a confessed, admitted Snapchat fangirlnot unlike those “Apple fanboys” you might be familiar with. Shamelessness goes both ways, guys.

I remember when Snapchat first began selling merchandise branded with Ghostface Chillah (that ghost logo of theirs, who I love, and who you secretly love, too). I immediately requested for everyone to buy me everything. Now, I’m the proud owner of an Official Snapchat Ice Tray. It makes Ghostface Chillah-shaped ice. Which, of course, eventually melts away. Perfect.

Of course I own Spectacles. I carry them in my bag with me everyday. I don’t wear them oftenmostly because I’ve got pretty bad eyesight, and I haven’t gotten prescription lenses because I just don’t want to be separated from my Spectacles for too long.

But I love them. I love wearing them to partiesI Snapped moments of my friend’s wedding. I wore them around Universal Studios. They’re absurd, sure. But they’re also a uniquely fun way to show the world what you’re living through, the moment you’re living through it.

And I absolutely loved their release. Snapbots: Those minion-looking vending machines, dropped in arbitrary locations around the country? They’re fun, dorky, ridiculous, and unique to Snapchat’s strange aesthetic. Instagram and Facebook have rarely had a tangible, real-world presence. Snapchat wants to make itself real in the world off of our phones.

As of this week, there are Stories in the Facebook News Feed. Which brings us back to the elephant in the room where Snapchat’s concerned: Instagram.

And I hate Instagram.

Go to my Instagram feed, which I think is public? Honestly, don’t know, and not gonna check. I love going to my Instagram feed and viewing the posts and Stories of the accounts I follow. Why? Because they’re mostly fluffy puppies. Go check out Chloe the Mini Frenchie and Teddy the Corgi. They’re the reason that I’m a weekly active user of Instagram.

I hate that Instagram is all about the number of likes and followers. I hate the Kardashians.

Instagram isn’t my go-to social network, and I’m pretty confident it never will be. Because, to be quite honest, I hate filtering my life. I hate the vain, highly-styled, carefully-crafted, unsurprising, deliberate nature of it. I hate that it’s a network all about the number of likes and followers. And I hate the Kardashians.

I know Snapchat isn’t perfect. Their racially-insensitive and scientifically-inaccurate lenses are, uh, not a good look. The fact that they don’t really prioritize Android devices and instead cater to iPhone users is just kind of weird at this stage. And I don’t like that they have a weirdly one-way, non-supportive relationship with its creators. I know from speaking to many of the most popular Viner users that this strategy didn’t work out well for themor Vine, either. And of course: Evan Spiegel said some bad shit in college. Snap’s also never released a workplace diversity report, unlike their peers in the tech industry. So, it goes without saying: They’ve got some work to do.

And yeah, at the end of the day, it’s just an app.

But these platforms are also places we’re spending increasing amounts of time in every daythey’re frames that we’re living our lives through, articulating something, creating something, sending some part of us out into the world. And so much more than its contemporaries, Snapchat, if nothing else, stands for things: Authenticity. Spontaneity. And that’s why I love Snapchat. It’s where you’ll find me at my most authentic. It’s where you’ll actually get to know who I really am.

If I let you, of course.

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